Audiobook Review: The Sins of Bees

Title: The Sings of Bees

Author: Annie Lampman

Release Date: September 1, 2020

Rating: 3.5/5 Stars

Find it here: Goodreads

Synopsis from Goodreads: Sins of the Bees blends natural majesty, mystery, and compelling characterizations to present the lives of two very different women and their tumultuous interactions with a dangerous doomsday cult.

Other than her bonsai trees, twenty-year-old arborist Silvania August Moonbeam Merigal is alone in the world. After first her mother dies and then her grandfather—the man who raised her and the last of her family—Silva suffers a sexual assault and becomes pregnant. Then, ready to end her own life, she discovers evidence of a long-lost artist grandmother, Isabelle.

Desperate to remake a family for herself, Silva leaves her island home on the Puget Sound and traces her grandmother’s path to first a hippie beekeeper named Nick Larkins with secrets of his own, and then to a religious, anti-government, Y2K cult embedded deep in the wilds of Hells Canyon. Len Dietz is the charismatic leader of the Almost Paradise compound, a place full of violence and drama: impregnated child brides called the Twelve Maidens, an armed occupation of a visitor’s center, shot-up mountain sheep washing up along with a half-drowned dog, and men transporting weapons in the middle of the night.

As tensions erupt into violence, Silva, Isabelle, Nick, and the members of Almost Paradise find themselves disastrously entangled, and Silva is forced to face both her own history of loss, and the history of loss she’s stepped into: ruinous stories of family that threaten to destroy them all.

My Review: First I have to say that the narrator for this audio book did a fantastic job and really brought the story to life. There are a few spots where the story is slow and the writing overly descriptive but having such a great narrator helped with that. As for the book I love the characters and thought they were very well developed. I enjoyed the setting and found the descriptions vivid and compelling. The writing style was very lyrical and lovely but it bogged down quite a few parts of the story and I think some tough editing to cut that down a bit would have really helped. Overall though I enjoyed the book and look forward to reading more of Lampman's work in the future.

*I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book which I received from the publisher. All opinions are my own.*