The Blood of Angels

October 6, 2014
This dour but impressive novel by renowned Finnish fantasist Sinisalo (Troll: A Love Story) is set in a near future in which colony collapse disorder, the mass disappearance of bees, has wreaked havoc on the world. With no bees to pollinate vital crops, devastating food shortages are unavoidable. So far Finland’s bees have been spared, but Orvo, a funeral director by profession and dedicated beekeeper by avocation, has just discovered that the bees from one of his hives have gone missing and he fears the worst. Sinisalo alternates Orvo’s somewhat elliptical ruminations about his life with posts from the increasingly radical environmentalist blog written by his son, Eero. There are also hints of another disaster involving Eero and the local slaughterhouse. The tale turns from near-future SF to fantasy when Orvo discovers the entry to another world in his barn loft and wonders whether this is where the vanished bees are fleeing to. The novel’s flat tone and didacticism can make it hard to warm to at first, but as Orvo’s life story emerges—particularly his complex relationships with his son, father, and grandfather—the reader will be moved to contemplate the unforeseen ways that each generation influences the next.

November 1, 2014
A new novel by Finnish author Sinisalo (Birdbrain, 2011, etc.) uses harrowing ecological collapse and an idyllic parallel world to examine both the possibility of global disaster and one man's surreal, life-altering experience of grief. A successful businessman and small-time beekeeper, Orvo lives in a world pushed slightly further into a future where poor environmental and agricultural decisions have had devastating effects. Food shortages and riots plague the United States, and the disintegration of the American economy is beginning to destabilize the entire developed world. Symptoms of catastrophic ecological damage, including the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of bees, spread until they reach Orvo's own small hives in Finland. When Orvo's teenage son, Eero, a fervent animal rights activist, gets killed during an idealistic stunt, Orvo's grief over his son and the loss of his bees leads him to discover a portal to an unspoiled parallel world where he hopes to find both. The novel alternates between Orvo's quiet, grief-muffled voice and breathless, increasingly fanatical blog entries written by Eero as a member of the "Animalist Revolutionary Army." These two contrasting threads allow the story to both withhold essential emotional detail in a reflection of Orvo's trauma and offer a flood of disturbing factual information about animal rights. While the novel often balances the voices well, playing them against each other to guide the reader's sympathies and understanding, at other times it fractures into an overwhelming number of elements and unnecessary attempts to obscure aspects of the plot. Orvo's discovery of the parallel world becomes an unexpected anchor, giving a concrete expression to his grief and reverence for the natural world and drawing on the fascinating, cross-cultural mythology of bees. At its best, Sinisalo's novel engages in a fierce discussion of ecological choices while also imagining an unusually picturesque, Orpheus-tinged search for love beyond death.

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Starred review from November 15, 2014

Colony Collapse Disorder is overtaking the world, and as the bees disappear, so do the food supplies. In Finland, amateur beekeeper Orvo is hit with dual losses: two of his hives are empty, and his son, the ecoblogger Eero, has died. As Orvo deals with these tragedies, he makes an amazing discovery in his old barn: a doorway into another world. Trying to separate fact from fiction, Orvo learns that bees may be able to travel among universes and are also associated with the afterlife. With the truths about Eero's ecological values revealed and the planet's agricultural disasters looming, could this portal to another reality not only save Orvo but lead to his son's resurrection as well? VERDICT At the intersection of science and fiction, award-winning Finnish author Sinisalo (Not Before Sundown; Troll) digs deep into a character who's searching for answers about his child, his life, and what may come after. Stunning prose takes the reader down a twisting path between gritty ecoterrorism and another world, with winged messengers leading the way.--Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., South Deerfield

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2014
Finnish author Sinisalo (Birdbrain, 2011) juxtaposes one man's personal grief with impending ecological disaster in this compelling and intimate rumination on animal rights, world food supply, and the indispensable role of bees to our environment. When Orvo, a beekeeper, finds a dead queen and abandoned hive, he worries that the colony-collapse phenomenon that is plaguing other countries has reached him. At the same time, Orvo is also mourning the loss of his son, Eero, an animal-rights activist whose blog posts discussing the role of animals and bees in our society Orvo rereads again and again. Sinisalo deftly intertwines Orvo's interior monologue with Eero's blog posts to convey a deep sense of longing and loss. When Orvo seemingly stumbles across a window into an alternate world, he begins to wonder at the relationship between his son, the mythology of bees, and the afterlife. The story is told with a quiet, literary precision and is a welcome addition to the sometimes raucous and violent nature of dystopian literature. Sinisalo won the James A. Tiptree award for her novel Troll: A Love Story in 2003.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)