The Bees by Laline Paull

Title: The Bees

Author: Laline Paull

Publisher: HarperCollins

Release Date: 6th May 2014

Genre: Fiction

Summary: 

Flora 717 is the lowest rank of her hive and is tasked with tidying up and cleaning after her fellow sisters all for the love of her Queen. Surviving internal massacres and purges, Flora's bravery grows and grows.

However, her love for the Queen is soon overruled by the maternal love of her daughter. Putting herself in serious danger after breaking her society's more sacred law, Flora must protect her daughter and the best interests of her colony.

Review:

I was not expecting much from this book, and luckily, as my expectations were very low, I was not disappointed.

I started reading this book a couple of months ago and gave up about one hundred pages in. However, seeing as I wanted to save two new books I had just brought for when I go on holiday, and had run out of movie ideas, I decided to painfully continue reading this book just to say I had finished it. Because lets face it, everyone hates starting a book and not being able to finish it...

Needless to say, I did not like this book one bit. The plot was slow, confusing and it was unbelievably hard to connect with the main character, a bee. 

Similarly, whilst the dynamics of the hive, and how corruption spread through it, were very interesting; I struggled to decipher any worthwhile meaning or parallelism between theirs and our society. I feel that maybe this book was trying to be a bit like George Orwell's Animal Farm about totalitarian society and corruption. Nonetheless, The Bees failed to have any noticeable sort of powerful or meaningful message.

Anyway, I am glad that I can say that I did not leave this book unfinished. It shall be put back on my bookshelf, never to be read again.

Rating: 2/10.

You can buy The Bees from Amazon here.