The Last Beekeeper
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3.9 • 9 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Julie Carrick Dalton's The Last Beekeeper is a celebration of found family, an exploration of truth versus power, and the triumph of hope in the face of despair.
"Fans of Delia Owens will swoon to find their new favorite author.” (Hank Phillippi Ryan)
It’s been more than a decade since the world has come undone, and Sasha Severn has returned to her childhood home with one goal in mind—find the mythic research her father, the infamous Last Beekeeper, hid before he was incarcerated. There, Sasha is confronted with a group of squatters who have claimed the quiet, idyllic farm as their own. While she initially feels threatened, the group soon becomes her newfound family, offering what she hasn't felt since her father was imprisoned: security and hope. Maybe it's time to forget the family secrets buried on the farm and focus on her future.
But just as she settles into her new life, Sasha witnesses the impossible. She sees a honey bee, presumed extinct. People who claim to see bees are ridiculed and silenced for reasons Sasha doesn't understand, but she can't shake the feeling that this impossible bee is connected to her father's missing research. Fighting to uncover the truth could shatter Sasha's fragile security and threaten the lives of her newfound family—or it could save them all.
Julie Carrick Dalton's The Last Beekeeper is a celebration of found family, an exploration of truth versus power, and the triumph of hope in the face of despair. It is a meditation on forgiveness and redemption and a reminder to cherish the beauty that still exists in this fragile world.
Also by Julie Carrick Dalton:
Waiting for the Night Song
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The disappearance of the world's bees, along with the other pollinating insects, in an ecological disaster dubbed the Great Collapse provides the backdrop for this moving postapocalyptic thriller from Dalton (Waiting for the Night Song). Sasha Butler, 22, changed her name from Alexandra Severn to hide that her father is Lawrence Severn, a bee researcher thought to have been the world's last beekeeper. With humanity desperate for information about bee survival, Lawrence went to prison rather than reveal that he had kept invaluable data about bees. Sasha knows he hid records at their rural home that could provide a basis for hope, but retrieving them is hampered by the presence of squatters on the property. She's also haunted by visions of bees, which she tells herself are just wishful hallucinations, but which also allow her to speculate that the Great Collapse could be reversed. Dalton does a fine job imbuing all the characters with plausible emotions and reactions to their grim reality. Superior worldbuilding (hysteria about bees has led Congress to criminalize "reporting bee sightings without evidence") elevates this above similar books.
