Sins of the Bees, Annie Lampman
Sins of the Bees, Annie Lampman
1 Rating(s)
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Sins of the Bees

Author: Annie Lampman

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell

Unabridged: 12 hr 11 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/27/2020


Synopsis

Other than her bonsai trees, twenty-year-old arborist Silvania August Moonbeam Merigal is alone in the world. After her mother dies and then her grandfatherthe man who raised her and the last of her familySilva 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 grandmothers path to 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 visitors 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 shes stepped into: ruinous stories of family that threaten to destroy them all.

About Annie Lampman

Annie Lampman has an MFA in fiction and teaches creative writing at the Washington State University Honors College. She has been awarded a 2020 Literature Fellowship Special Mention by the Idaho Commission on the Arts, a Best American Essays “Notable,” a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, the Dogwood Literary Award in Fiction, the Everybody Writes Award in Poetry, and a Bureau of Land Management national wilderness artist’s residency in the Owyhee Canyonlands Wilderness. She lives in Moscow, Idaho.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Erika on September 23, 2020

4.5 Stars “Nobody had ever warned her that in grieving the ones you’ve lost, you’re really grieving for yourself the most. Your whole world, the story of your life, shaped and defined by your loved ones’ experience of it. That without them, you can’t ever see or understand yourself fully again.” -......more

Goodreads review by Karen Chrisman on September 04, 2020

Beautiful I loved this book. The language was so lyrical and lovely. It kept me engaged and waiting for what would happen next. I enjoy books that teach me something about subjects with which I am not wholly familiar. Annie Lampman is a true poet and wonderful story teller.......more

Goodreads review by Maddie on December 15, 2020

"Sins of the Bees" by Annie Lampman follows Silva, a young woman who leaves everything behind to track down her long-lost grandmother, Isabelle. Silva finds evidence that her grandmother became part of a Y2K cult before everyone losing all trace of her, so she moves near the cult and tries to learn......more

Goodreads review by Claudio on January 06, 2021

3/5 stars 🐝 Thanks to Netgalley for providing an audiobook e-arc! ✨Now...this was awkward timing. We follow characters intertwined in different ways to a white supremacist doomsday Y2K cult. It was a good book that fascinated me, especially with Silva and Nick with their own interests. One tiny detai......more

Goodreads review by Sunhawk on January 28, 2021

Maybe it was the title that intrigued me? I do like bees, and in my experience, books with bees in the title are worth reading. I did make it through this book, because the story was interesting; it even ended well. But to do so, I had to triage its many sections. There were italicized bits that baf......more