20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Like a rose..., July 5, 2000
A few years ago, a book entitled "The Stone Diaries" received a lot of notice. I read the book and found it interesting but depressing. "Diaries" was a tale told through an older dead woman's diaries.
"A Recipe for Bees" follows a similiar approach, but it's a very different book. It left me feeling reflective, but it also left me with a sense of serenity. God's in his heaven and all's right with the world, when love, forgiveness and acceptance make it so.
"A Recipe for Bees" opens one afternoon as Augusta Olsen, a woman in her 70's, arrives home after a difficult rail trip. Augusta's daughter Joy has dispatched her from the hospital where Joy's husband is undergoing brain surgery. The book ends 5-6 hours later, sometime after dinner when the fate of Joy's beekeeper husband is known. During that period Augusta reflects over her life.
"A Recipe for Bees" is as skillfully woven as the rugs Augusta's mother Helen once made--pulling strands of colored wool through pieces of burlap backing. One of Helen's rugs had a large pink rose woven into the center. This beautiful book is like that rug, a work of art.
The book is a love story--of a long marriage. At each turn of events, the marriage is different. In the beginning, you wonder how Augusta can stand her life with Karl on the cold comfort farm that killed his own mother. But Augusta finds ways to cope. She fishes with the pastor of her church. She finds work in town to earn a little pin money. She takes a lover, she has a baby, she takes up bee-keeping. The bees are always hovering in the background.
Augusta learned bee-keeping by observing her mother Helen. When Helen dies, Augusta's father Manny turns out the hives, a European custom to aid the ascent of the beekeeper's soul. All the swarms of bees disburse except for one that stays until sunset, clustered in a ball against the kitchen window. Then "catching the last of the light [the bees flew] off in a glittering golden-red globe that moved through the sky as if guided by a single mind."
Helen's bees take up residence in the abandoned honey shed where she bottled her honey. Decades later, after experiencing a vision of her mother in the honey shed, Augusta uses their descendents and her mother's bee-keeping equipment to become a bee-keeper. Honey, bees, pollen, nectar, and flowers are the metaphors of Augusta's life.
The author has placed a beautiful collection of photos of her own Canadian family in this book. Gail Anderson-Dargatz writing is reminiscent of the tales by Alice Munro.
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A honey of a novel, May 21, 1999
By A Customer
I must admit to surprise that I am the first person to review this book as it was one of those books which you feel like discussing as soon as you have finished it.
I enjoyed Gail Anderson-Dargatz' first effort (The Cure for Death by Lightning) immensely and was a little concerned that this book might be a bit too similar - an impression which was based on the similar cover and an equally "cutesy" name. However I was pleased to find that this book was quite different and a worthy second novel.
The language in this novel is beautiful, with an ability to evoke quite an emotional response from the reader. I particularly liked the descriptions of the landscape. The rhythms of farming life are described in vivid detail in a way that makes you linger over every word (rather than skipping over descriptive text to get to the story - something I am often guilty of doing). I could almost taste the honey eaten straight from the comb or the berries plucked straight from the bush (eaten while still warm from the sun).
The characters are introduced through the eyes of Augusta, who is the novel's protagonist. The reader tends to react to the other characters in the novel in much the same way as Augusta herself - when she describes her son-in-law, Gabe, as always having the smell of honey about him, you instantly warm to him and little else needs to be written to establish his character. Likewise, while Karl (Augusta's husband) has a small role in the novel in terms of dialogue, the reader feels like they know him well through Augusta's feelings for him. You forgive his early weaknesses because you feel Augusta's genuine love for him and the comfort which they find in each other's company. I must admit that I felt that some of the other characters in the novel may have been a little more one dimensional, particularly Joy, but that may just have been because Augusta herself often had difficulty in relating to her.
Overall I found this to be a honey of a novel and would happily recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the Cure for Death by Lightning.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Ultimately a tedious journey through time, March 5, 2001
By A Customer
I wanted to care about Augusta, I really did. But I found that the transitions from past to present and back again were awkward and I became impatient with them. The problems begin when we find Augusta returning home from a train ride. She then begins to reminisce about her very recent journey, which leads to further reminiscences about her life, spanning more than 70 years. Some fairly contrived situations lead to these memories, such as Augusta spying someone who looks like someone from her past. While this is not an implausible way for memories to occur, it's a bit facetious to have this happen repeatedly in the course of a single day, but this is how we come to know about the heroine's entire life. Ocassionally one is expected to make the transition from past to present without so much as a page break; the mention of Augusta's husband and nosy neighbor sitting in her apartment taking a nap is meant to be enough to snap us ahead thirty years from the author's last line. Surely there is a better way to make these transitions!!! (The awkward shifts in time remind me of how seamlessly some other authors accomplish this, most notably, David Guterson in "Snow Falling on Cedars".) By the end of this novel, I was so jet lagged from all the clumsy time travel I couldn't care less if poor Gabe lived or died or if Augusta had, in fact, foreseen her own demise.
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