Sins of the Bees

July 13, 2020
When Silva Merigal, the 20-year-old heroine of Lampman’s affecting, lyrical debut, is going through her late grandfather Eamon’s effects on Washington State’s Trawler Island, she discovers paintings of 12 pregnant teenage girls in an envelope postmarked Two Rivers, Idaho. A handwritten note suggests that the paintings were sent to Eamon for safekeeping by Eamon’s runaway wife, Isabelle, the artist grandmother Silva has never met. Silva decides to drive to Two Rivers, where she hopes to find Isabelle, but instead encounters apocalyptic cult leader Len Dietz, who’s collecting munitions for the end times while grooming child brides to birth his holy army. The texts of Isabelle’s unsent letters to Eamon, filled with wistful love for him and grief over the fates of the girls she has been commissioned to paint by the female cult member who managed the brides’ training, punctuate the twinned stories of Silva’s search and her relationship with beekeeper Nick Larkin, an enemy of Len’s, whose property near the cult’s compound she winds up helping Nick look after. Though grounded in a mystery, the novel blossoms when it explores how the rhythms of nature add grace to human solitude. Only an incongruously happy ending mars this profound, stark tale of loss and longing across generations. Lampman is a writer to watch. Agent: Mark Gottlieb, Trident Media.

August 1, 2020
Pregnant after an attack by several men, Silva Merigal leaves her Trawler Island, Washington, home and heads for Two Rivers, Idaho, the town where her grandmother once lived and where she disappeared into a religious cult. Silva leaves behind more than memories of her attack; on Trawler, she lived a childhood idyll with her grandfather, a bonsai master from whom she learned everything. But Two Rivers offers its own idyll when she stumbles upon a job as caretaker of a ranch where her nascent love interest is starting a beekeeping business. Overshadowing all is a standoff between the FBI and the still-existing cult, a Branch Davidian-like operation that violently resists the outside world, including Silva's efforts to discover her grandmother's fate. The plot takes awhile to get going, but gorgeous and thought-provoking descriptions of bee and tree life, as well as the Pacific Northwest generally, make up for it, and the romance element adds a soothing touch, too. Suggest some nature-focused nonfiction, such as Peter Wohlleben's Can You Hear the Trees Talking (2019), to go with Lampman's debut novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)