This book has a fantastic opening sentence. Here it is:"'Have I told you the drone's penis snaps off during intercourse with the queen bee?" asked Augusta."The story this book tells is set in the late 1990s, with most of the action happening in flashbacks. The "present" is never clearly defined, and could easily be from the 1970s to the early years of the 21st century. Only vague mentions of World War II set the book's time frame.The main character is an old woman, but the reader learns about her childhood, teenage years, and (mostly) young adulthood through flashbacks. The woman is a bee keeper, hence the bees in the title. Information about bees is mentioned throughout the story.I realize this review seems really dry, as if I am writing a book review for a middle school English class and I am carefully dealing with setting (oh yes, the whole book is set in Canada), characters, etc. That's not the way I usually write reviews. I guess I fell back on that style of writing since I don't have strong emotions related to this book. It's just not very exciting. I don't love it. I don't hate it.The main themes of the book are love and growing older (death). In the present day plot line (all of which takes place in one day), the main character is waiting to find out whether or not her daughter's husband will survive brain surgery. In flashbacks, the main character's mother and unborn sister die. The main character's father dies several years later. Then her husband's much hated father dies. (Before the main character marries him, her husband's mother committed suicide.) During the main character's childhood, the son of a hired hand dies on her family farm. The preacher with whom the main characters has a much gossiped about friendship dies. The man she actually has an affair with dies. It makes sense that an old woman would have seen a lot of death during her lifetime, but these are all handled in such a way that the reader knows that death is a MAIN IDEA of the book.Between all the death is love. There is the love between the protagonist and her husband, including the fact that he doesn't show his love the way she craves. There is mother-daughter love, father-son love, friendly love and passionate love.There's quite a bit of sex too, but all of the sex scenes are totally PG-13, lukewarm, and yawn inducing. All of the sex is referred to as "lovemaking." If I had read this book as a young teenager hoping to learn a thing or two about sex by reading a grown-up book, I would have been sadly disappointed. This book did nothing to make me think of Canadians as a passionate people.This is one of those books that are good for long bus rides and waiting rooms. It helps pass the time, but I don't imagine I will ever think about it much in the future, and I'm pretty sure I'll never want to read it again.
I picked up a copy of A Recipe for Bees at without knowing anything about it -- it just seemed interesting after reading the back cover. The book did indeed remind me quite a bit of The Stone Diaries, and also Drowning Ruth (both great reads, by the way). It's got that whole mid-20th century rural thing happening. The story follows the life of Augusta Olsen, now aging with a weak hip, through a series of flashbacks. Unlike other reviewers, I didn't find the flashbacks too difficult to follow, although I do agree that after a while, all of Augusta's visions and sightings on one day in the present that triggered all the memories got just a little too formulaic and convenient. The novel doesn't have anything too pretty to say about growing old, either. Nevertheless, I found A Recipe for Bees to be interesting and well-written. The theme of bee-keeping was well-woven into the plot, and nicely framed the themes of marriage, children, and infidelity. Gail Anderson-Dargatz is a talented writer and I look forward to reading more from her.
What do You think about A Recipe For Bees (1999)?
Gail Anderson-Dargatz, A Recipe for Bees (Harmony, 1998)At first, A Recipe for Bees has the look and feel of your typical dysfunctional family novel. Augusta Olsen, traveling home from the hospital where her son-in-law is being operated on after a seizure-induced stroke, ends up getting off the train at the wrong stop to use the rest room. The train goes on without her, and Augusta calls her next-door neighbor, Rose to come pick her up. While Rose is driving her home, and after they get there, Augusta tells Rose and Karl, Augusta's husband, a number of stories about Augusta and Karl's lives up to this point, interspersed with present-day events and reflections on things she'd rather not talk about aloud. While there is dysfunction in evidence all around, there are snatches of writing here and there that alert the reader that this isn't your typical novel; Anderson-Dargatz is capable of much more than the average...novel of the week.Those moments of inspired, poetic writing are few, however, and some of them are easily missed in the greater scheme of things. A Recipe for Bees is one of the most difficult kinds of novels to read, a book with almost no pace to it that demands all the concentration the reader can give it. The first few chapters, especially, are quite difficult to get through. Once you've got a sense of the characters, the book gets more engrossing, and eventually it does give the distinct feeling that Anderson-Dargatz will eventually write the novels that will put her on a par with fellow Canadian authors...A Recipe for Bees isn't one of them, but years from now, scholars will come back to it and call it a formative novel.I'll be looking forward to reading more of Anderson-Dargatz' work. ***
—Robert Beveridge
Although a nice story, this book didn't have much in it to keep my attention. In fact, there were several times that I thought about not finishing the book. The story is about a woman named Augusta who is married to Karl. They live in Rural BC and have a farm. The story is about their marriage, the hardships of life and inlaws all told with a bit of bee folk lore thrown in as an analogy. The story jumped around a lot in time from past to present. In addition, Augusta has visions which are also described in the book. You had to pay close attention to whether the story was taking place in the past, present, future, or not at all. The book was "fine" but I certainly wouldn't recommend it.
—Laura
Dissappointing tale of one woman (Augusta Olsen) who recalls portions of her young adulthood and the early part of her marriage to Karl while awaiting word about the condition of her son-in-law who is undergoing surgery. I wanted to like this novel as the Augusta and Karl have intriging aspects to them but as a whole, the novel is disjointed and without a clear centeral plot. However, the characters of Joy and Olaf (daughter and father-in-law) are simply horrid and appear to exist simply to personify evil. Additionally, there are numerous occasions where it is unapparent whether the action is present day Augusta or Augusta remembering something from years ago and this got extremely annoying after the first couple times. The title suggests that Augusta's role as a beekeeper, a role she learned from her mother, will be the central them but instead it serves as little more than a device to move the chapters along. Ultimately, i don't recommend this outing by Anderson-Dargatz.
—Nicole
