The Bee Maker

The year is 2036. Honeybees are nearly extinct, the world's crops are disappearing, and Melissa's origami may be the only thing that can save them.

When she hears haunting music in a parched almond grove and starts having visions of an ancient shrine, thirteen-year-old Melissa Bui thinks she's losing it. Things aren't going well to begin with. Her father isn't thrilled with new custody arrangements and medication hasn't cured her form of epilepsy⎯-staring spells that erase entire moments of her life.

Melissa copes with troubles by folding origami, so it seems like a good plan to fold a thousand origami honeybees as a prayer and, hopefully, a way to connect with her uncommunicative father. He's a scientist in a race against time to save honeybees by tapping into their communication system that he believes may involve a special ability to rearrange quarks. Melissa soon finds herself thrust back in time when her origami opens a portal to Ancient Crete. There she encounters a girl, Amethea, who is torn between an ambition to run in the Women's Olympics or to save her disabled brother from becoming a human sacrifice. Melissa realizes that saving the young boy and pulling modern honeybees back from the brink of extinction are intertwined, but she may risk blinking out of existence like the quarks her scientist father studies.

Set in the Texas Hill Country and a small island off the coast of Crete, The Bee Maker is a 50,000 word Middle Grades novel that affirms that young people can overcome limitations, even of time and space, by drawing strength from the fire of creation within themselves.