![]() Paull couldn’t convince me I was following Flora the bee. John Mandel can make me believe I’m on the moon. The story had such potential, but it lacked the subtlety to make it believable or even truly bizarre compared with some other stories. ![]() The huge amounts of religion makes sense in a hive, but why were the prayers modelled so closely after Christianity? Why would an old, experienced beekeeper take too much during a wet season? And all the Mary-Sue syndrome was agonizing for a regular reader of YA and fantasy. ![]() The biggest issue I had would be a spoiler, but here are some lesser ones: Most of the classes felt too much like clumsy approximations of human heirarchy and there were several gaping holes in the research which made me cringe throughout the book. ![]() It had the potential, but the trouble wasn’t quite Paull’s skill, it was her conviction. Paull was careful about her scene sculpting and it was satisfying to read.īut…it didn’t do for bees what Watership Down did for rabbits. We follow Flora the lowly sanitation bee through her life as she experiences the myriad troubles both inside and out of her colony. I was looking for something like this and I know honeybees are phenomenal creatures, so I had a bit of cover lust as soon as I saw it. So, Charlotte’s Web, The Rats of Nimh, Animal Farm…you get the idea. It’s what turned a lot of us onto reading in the first place stories told from an animal’s perspective. There’s a genre I was hearing about called xenofiction. ![]()
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