Customer Reviews

A Recipe for Bees: A Novel

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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.

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.

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.

I don't often recommend many books because I read so many but this book A Recipe For Bees stands out. Augusta is someone we can all relate to somewhere in our lives. This is story of life, the way it is lived. This is a love story that doesn't rely on faked emotions or happily ever after endings. This is a story about humans with all out faults and our perfections! A book that makes you glad you read it. This is the book to recommend to friends.

"Have I told you the drone's penis snaps off during intecourse with the queen bee?"

Great first sentence....wouldn't you say? This is how "The Recipe for Bees" begins. And it only gets better.

Dargatz deals with so many emotions, I found myself laughing one moment and crying the next....

Joy, humor, anger, sadness, spirituality....all tangled up together in one beautiful, unexpected package.

Augusta is old....but remembers what it was like to be young.

She is ahead of her time and feels she deserves more than what
she is getting....
living on the farm isn't what it's cracked up to be....
She is lonely and bored, gets no consideration or passion from her husband.

"Is this my life?" she wonders. "No love, no sex, no nothing."

"Is it really a man's world?" The first sentence gives the reader a superb indication of what Augusta thinks of that!

"As soon as the drone mounts and thrusts, he's paralyzed, his genitals snap off, and he falls backward a hundred feet to his death."

Iteresting and true....

Dargatz uses bees as usefull metaphores throughout this lovely piece of work... The bees are seasons. Augusta is in her last. She is already turning color along with the leaves.

To me, this book is filled with SPRING!

It unfolds and blooms and surprise us with a vivid new flower.... at times.... Even rising up through the snow.

A Recipe for Bees reminded me a lot of the novel Vinegar Hill. In both stories, a wife is living in a dark, unpleasant home environment. In A Recipe for Bees, Augusta, an older lady, approaching the end of her life, reflects back upon her childhood and her marriage. Her mother dies at a young age, leaving her alone with an unaffectionate father. When she meets Karl and they become married, Augusta moves from one unaffectionate household to another. Living at Karl's father's farm, Augusta is only subject to more withholding of affection and is living a dark and depressing life. The rest of the novel delves into Augusta's search for independence and what she chooses to make of her life. The story takes us down journeys of the ups and downs of marriage, being a misfit in the community, and mother/daughter relationships. The main problem reading it, is that I couldn't find it in me to like the main character, Augusta. I also felt that the story left the reader with a depressed feeling of what marriage is like. The weaving of the "bee" theme added a nice touch to the story, but if you're looking for a great read with a "bee" them, try The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. The writing in A Recipe for Bees was good, but I felt the story was lacking something~

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.

I enjoyed reading the book until about halfway through - there are a few instances of animal abuse (particularly about horses) that really bothered me, so I won't finish the rest of it because I don't know what other upsetting things might be contained in the book. Was the author trying to illustrate the rough, tough life of the Canadian wilderness? If so, I know I won't do any sightseeing there! If you love animals alot like I do, find something else to read!

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. ***

I loved this book. I felt the characters to be extraordinarily vivid; timeless and alive. I didn't want this book to end -- and have been savoring the final few pages. this is a tale by a master storyteller, without the bells and whistles that accompany most popular fiction. yet I feel certain this fine novel will find an audience -- I consider myself quite fortunate to have discovered it, and will read everything else by this skilled author.....