Recipe for Bees - Hardcover

Anderson-Dargat

3.68

4,177 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609604511 ISBN 13: 9780609604519

Publisher: Crown Publications, 1999

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Awaiting news about her much-loved son-in-law Gabe, as he undergoes surgery, Augusta reminiscences about her sometimes harsh, sometimes wonderful life, from her mother's early death and her difficult marriage to a life-changing love affair and the benefits of old age. 25,000 first printing.

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Review:

Following the international success of The Cure for Death by Lightning, Gail Anderson-Dargatz has written an extraordinary and beguiling second novel. A "foray backwards in time", A Recipe for Bees is the telling of a woman's life: Augusta Olsen, a farmer's daughter, then a farmer's wife, living in the isolation-- desolation--of rural Canada. Conjuring that landscape and its time, the photos from Anderson-Dargatz's family album scattered throughout the book suggest that this is an obscurely personal narrative, a testimony to the many "strange tales" and the unique loves that lives lived so close to the land can solicit. Sometimes painful, often pitiless--the possibility of a slow death from loneliness and frustration on her husband's farm haunts the young Augusta-- A Recipe for Bees is on the side of a visionary bid for life: the resistance and resource which drives Augusta to manufacture love as she manufactures honey, forging pleasure through friendship, family, narrative--and the strange world of bees. "Have I told you the drone's penis snaps off during intercourse with the queen bee?" The memorable opening line of a novel preoccupied by bees, the sensual language of bees, and the difficulty of making life out of death. -- Vicky Lebeau

Review:

?A Recipe for Bees reminds us all it's never too late to fall in love. Chris Bohjalian, author of "Midwives"

?A Recipe for Bees reminds us all it's never too late to fall in love. Chris Bohjalian, author of Midwives

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