Dewey Caron
The Music of Bees is a fictitious novel involving three diverse characters bonding together through the magic of honey bees. The author, Eileen Garvin, is an Oregon Apprentice level Master Beekeeper. An eight-year beekeeper, she currently maintains three colonies in Hood River, Oregon, the setting of the novel.
If you want to get “hooked” into reading a novel, the first chapter is masterful. It begins, as all chapters do, with a quote from none other than L. L. Langstroth. Author Garvin provides a rich, deep introduction to wheelchair bound teenager Jake Stevenson, paralyzed from the waist down in a freak accident. The accident dashed his dream of a music future and exasperates an unhealthy home family dynamic. He is rudderless until Jake accidentally meets beekeeper Alice Holtzman.
Author Eileen Garvin introduces 44-year-old hobbyist beekeeper Alice in Chapter 2. Alice is working in a Hood County Planning Commission job where she is overworked and under-appreciated. She is unsettled from the unexpected death of her husband. Her path crosses Jakes as she is rushing to get home before dark with a dozen Russian nucs to install in new hives.
When she faces a crossroads at her Planning Commission day job, Alice begins to seriously consider what she really wants to do – which is to keep honey bees as a full-time pursuit along with a fruit orchard business. But her parents sold the family orchard a few years back and 24 colonies won’t pay the bills. After she takes Jake in, he proves handy, caring for the new nucs and Alice’s overwintered colonies. Both of their destinies change. Jake turns out to have knack for “listening” to the bees and gains bee care skills rapidly.
There is a third party in the story. Twenty-four-year-old Harry Stokes responds to Alice’s employee wanted post. He is a lost soul with acute social anxiety and an inferiority complex and wants little to do with the bees. Alice helps him sort out his life. Columbia River kite surfer Yogi helps draw him out and provides Harry with a purpose.
The bees themselves become almost a fourth character in this warm story about three strangers in a rural Oregon town, each working through grief, brought together by honey bees. The book is rich in details of how bees live and their care. Along the way, we have a nice description of the Hood River area, a valley in the shadow of Mt. Hood, famed for fruit production. (For a look at fruit production and bee pollination in the Hood River Valley see the National Honey Board’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T011wa2W1c)
This novel is about fighting for what is right. Alice, again by accident, gets involved in a campaign to halt use of a neonicotinoid bee-killing chemical pesticide, being introduced to the orchard farmers, after first-hand experience of them killing her bees. She enlists neighbors and local beekeepers and is joined by Jake and Harry to stage a protest, which ends in a couple of unexpected twists. I won’t spoil the ending but it is one of hope and future, not past and poor circumstances.
The Music of Bees, Eileen’s first novel was an ABC TV Good Morning America’s Buzz pick, billed as a heartwarming and uplifting story. It also was a Good Housekeeping Book Club Pick, People Magazine Best New Book, Washington Post Best Summer Read, Indie Next Pick, Library Reads Pick, a Christian Science Monitor Pick and was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021. It was released as a paperback in 2022 and is available in audiobook and Kindle. (Eileen would consider doing a Zoom presentation to a bee club or book reading on The Music of Bees).
In addition to the story, you are sure to enjoy the great beekeeping information supplied by author Eileen.
The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin. Dutton hardback April 2021, paperback April 2022. 336 pages. ISBN-13 978-0503183922
