Honey, Hallucinations, and Harbingers: A Review of Keeper of the Bees

Keeper of the Bees (2018)
Written by: Meg Kassel
Genre: YA Paranormal Romance
Pages: 304 (Kindle)
Series: Black Bird of the Gallows*
Publisher: Entangled Teen

* = Note: same universe, standalone story

Why I Chose It: I was given the ebook advance reader copy in return for a fair review. But I also picked it myself because it sounded super interesting.

The Premise: Dresden is cursed. His chest houses a hive of bees that he can’t stop from stinging people with psychosis-inducing venom. His face is a shifting montage of all the people who have died because of those stings. And he has been this way for centuries—since he was eighteen and magic flowed through his homeland, corrupting its people.

He follows harbingers of death, so at least his curse only affects those about to die anyway. But when he arrives in a Midwest town marked for death, he encounters Essie, a seventeen-year-old girl who suffers from debilitating delusions and hallucinations. His bees want to sting her on sight. But Essie doesn’t see a monster when she looks at Dresden.

Essie is fascinated and delighted by his changing features. Risking his own life, he holds back his bees and spares her. What starts out as a simple act of mercy ends up unraveling Dresden’s solitary life and Essie’s tormented one. Their impossible romance might even be powerful enough to unravel a centuries-old curse.

No spoilers

Discussion: I loved this book.

I loved how different it was from anything else I’ve read in a very long time. The universe Kassel has created with these characters and their reasons for being is fascinating and unique. I feel like Neil Gaiman would be into what’s between these pages, and I’d love to see his partner in illustrating crime, Dave McKean, draw them.

While the story itself is excellent – many different threads to follow, all of which have their own conclusion and tie themselves off nicely – it’s the characters that I loved the most. They were atypical in every way. Plenty of YA novels have a dark, brooding boy and a girl who is inexplicably attracted to him. But here the voices given to the characters are strong so you get a powerful sense of the kind of peope they are. Moreover, each person has ties to something stronger than them that has influenced how they’ve developed over the years (or in Dresden’s case, centuries).

Dresden’s got a chest full of bees that are meant to sting people and drive them to their deaths. So he’s dispassionate for a large amount of the time and it comes through. And why wouldn’t he be? He’s seen so much and killed a great many people, at this point he’s just in base creature survival mode, moving through the years doing his thing and that’s basically it. You don’t really question how strong his feelings come on for Essie because he hasn’t felt anything in so long, even the simplest of emotions would be like the taste of a piece of candy to a starving person. It’s all very believable and it’s fun to watch him change.

Essie, on the other hand, has been busy her entire life trying to keep her chin up and look at the bright side despite having some awful experiences ranging from an abusive father to the fact that her brain is, unfortunately, a bit on the scrambled side. But I love so much that she fights so hard to not only deal with the things she hallucinates, but also against all the people that try to hurt her. And she goes through a lot. In a way, I guess she’s lucky to have dealt with so many varying hallucinations over the years because I feel like most people would be traumatized after dealing with all the things Essie had to go through.

There were also a lot of other characters in this book, but they all had a very specific role to play, they all had very distinct personalities, and it was interesting to see how each of them fit into the puzzle of the story. The Strawman was particularly intriguing and I’d love to know more about him someday (also, Essie’s nickname for him cracked me up).

I loved the general vibe of this book, too. One of impending doom yet with this little spark of hope in the middle of it. You wonder how much this little spark of hope will fix things, if it’s meant to fix the coming calamity or if it’s just going to sit and weather the storm and then come out to go home happily ever after. Considering how many things are going on, it can be hard to tell, and frankly for me, not being able to guess what’s coming next is the hallmark of quality storytelling. Being able to guess what’s around the corner can be fun when you’re right, but being surprised is even better. Add to the effect, as the disaster was unfolding in the book, a very powerful thunderstorm decided to blow through the area as I was reading. Everything is falling apart on the pages while trees whipped around, hail came down, and the lights flickered in my house. Color me two parts giddy and one part kinda freaked out.

I only have one question and one qualm about this book. I don’t fully understand the Strawman’s motives for certain things (I can’t be more specific because it would ruin a major plot point). He does things that seem at odds with each other, but being a creature driven by a kind of supernatural instinct (the best way I can put it), perhaps he was just doing what he does and it happened to interfere with the other events around him that he was already dabbling in. I’ll probably never know (or maybe I could just ask the author). My only real qualm with the story? At the very beginning a single bee gets cheeky in the hopes of leaving Dresden’s body to sting someone. And the bee is referred to as a “he.” Supernatural bees or not, given that it is also mentioned Dresden has a queen bee, she has drones, and the rest appear as normal honeybees (they even make honey inside him), then every bee Dresden sends out to sting someone should be a she. Worker honeybees are female, so that sentence made me twitch.

Luckily it only comes up that one time, and the rest of the book is amazing, and who knows? Perhaps in future publications they’ll change it. 

In Conclusion: Keeper of the Bees is 100% worth the read. Even though it does mention in certain places online that its #2 in the Black Bird of the Gallows series, it really is it’s own standalone story. There’s a moment where Dresden meets some folk that give you the very clear impression that they have their own story somewhere else, but it’s not imperative you know what it is. Having said that, you’re clearly going to want to go back and read the first book just to find out. Especially if it’s anything like this book – I know I’m certainly going to!

Keeper of the Bees is out now, so be sure to go pick up a copy!