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Title: A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dargatz ISBN: 0-385-72048-3 Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday Pub. Date: 03 April, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Like a rose...
Comment: 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.
Rating: 4
Summary: A gem of a book!
Comment: "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.
Rating: 3
Summary: Excellent writing, just not enough of it.
Comment: 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. ***
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Title: The Cure for Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz ISBN: 0385720475 Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday Pub. Date: 08 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Nectar by David C. Fickett ISBN: 076530175X Publisher: Forge Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Beeing: Life, Motherhood, and 180,000 Honey Bees by Rosanne Daryl Thomas ISBN: 1585747319 Publisher: The Lyons Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: The Honey Thief by Elizabeth Graver ISBN: 0156013908 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 28 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Three Junes by Julia Glass ISBN: 0385721420 Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday Pub. Date: 22 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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