February 1, 2019
A moving memoir that tells the story of how helping her grandfather tend his beehives helped a girl survive a troubled childhood.Former San Francisco Chronicle reporter May's (co-author: I, Who Did Not Die, 2017) parents separated when she was 5. Her troubled, emotionally distant mother moved her and her younger brother back to the rural home shared by her own mother and her mother's second husband, who tended beehives all over Carmel Valley in California. After the author's mother took to her room and refused to deal with the kids, the author spent most of her nonschool hours with "Grandpa," driving around in his old truck to inspect hives, learning about bees, and eventually assisting him to harvest honey in an old bus he had rigged up just for this purpose. May balances the familiar story of an inadequate mother who veers between neglect and occasional abuse with a clear portrayal of her gratitude for the thoughtful, dependable man who taught her to reach out beyond her toxic nuclear family and make her way into the wider world, encouraging her to go to college and not let herself be defined by her mother's weaknesses. Her love of nature, too, and particularly of the unexpected intricacies of the ways bees behave, has provided her with a sense of peace and perspective. "Over time," she writes, "the more I discovered about the inner world of honeybees, the more sense I was able to make of the outer world of people." May also weaves into the narrative intriguing facts about the social lives and roles of honeybees, and she describes with affection the details of the process of producing honey and the role the beekeeper plays in the lives of bees. While her subject may be honeybees, they serve as a launching point for a tale of self-discovery and the natural world at large.A fascinating and hopeful book of family, bees, and how "even when [children] are overwhelmed with despair, nature has special ways to keep them safe."
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March 15, 2019
Journalist May mines her deeply upsetting personal history in this sharply visceral memoir. After an ugly family breakup, she and her little brother moved across the country to California in 1975 with their troubled mother. They found refuge with their grandparents, and it was there that May's stepgrandfather introduced her to honeybees, inciting a lifelong love of the man and his hobby. As she covers the trials and tribulations of life with her disturbed mother and enabling grandmother, she intersperses chapters on caring for the bees and her grandfather's quiet patience as he educated her on his passion. Most of the book takes place when May was very young?half of it at the age of five?and it must be assumed that she is generalizing in her recounted conversations from that time. Readers will likely overlook any concerns about the veracity of her child memory, however, as they are caught up in the harrowing experiences she shares and the tenderness of exchanges with her brother, father, and grandfather.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
June 1, 2019
Award-winning journalist May worked at the San Francisco Chronicle for many years, but she's also a fifth-generation beekeeper, the real thrust of this memoir. In a book compared to H Is for Hawk, she recounts how she was raised by her grandfather, an offbeat original who made honey while living in a rusty old bus. With her parents having spun apart when she was five and her mother hiding out in the bedroom, always on the edge, May bonded with her grandfather and learned the glories of nature, and particularly bees. Lots of in-house love for this one; there's a 175,000-copy first printing.
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