The Last Beekeeper by Julie Carrick Dalton

What happens to the world if bees become extinct? What would the world look like? That’s what Julie Carrick Dalton tackles in her speculative fiction/dystopian/near-future novel, The Last Beekeeper.

Sasha’s dad is known as The Last Beekeeper and has been imprisoned for the past 11 years while Sasha has been in the foster care system. Her dad was imprisoned because keeping bees had become illegal when the government wanted all hives in their control, so they could “save the bees.” Sasha’s dad was a scientist and was working to find ways to save the hives on their farm when he was found out and arrested.

Sasha is now 22 years old and is returning to her childhood home to try to find the secret documents her dad buried before his arrest. When she arrives, she finds a group of squatters living on the farm. She does not want them to know who she is, so she pretends she just happened upon them and then tries to prove her worth, so they will allow her to stay. What begins as a mission to find the documents becomes a meaningful found family dynamic and a new mission to determine if the phantom bee sightings nearby are real or imagined.

This is not a typical genre for me, but I am weirdly drawn to novels about bees, so I had to read this – and I am so very glad I did! This book was speculative, near-future fiction, but felt all-too-realistic. There were times I was reading it when I needed a break because I was just overwhelmed by the potential realities of lack of food that resulted from the loss of bees. The story goes between Sasha as a child and Sasha now and both timelines were equally engaging. The relationships she develops with her fellow squatters were also so real and meaningful.

I loved this book and if you have any interest in speculative/dystopian fiction or bees, I highly recommend checking it out!

Check out The Last Beekeeper by Julie Carrick Dalton for yourself from the Library (https://catalog.lclibs.org/polaris/search/title.aspx…).