Hour of the Bees by Lindsay Eagar

Carol (short for Carolina) is not happy that she will be spending her summer in the middle of nowhere in the New Mexican desert with only her family for company. Her grandfather, Serge, has Alzheimer’s, and alternates between moments of true lucidity and forgetfulness, sometimes calling Carol by her grandmother’s name, Rosa. Hour of the Bees is a place where the line between reality and magic is blurred, like the horizon line in the desert.

The red dust and the blue sky speak of a drought that has lasted over a hundred years. Time seems to have stood still, with only the shearing of sheep to indicate that time has past. Even Serge’s dog, Inés, is the same dog that Carol’s father had when he was young. When the bees start to appear in the bone dry desert, nobody believes Carol, except Serge.

“Bees, impossible. But it’s only impossible if you stop to think about it…If you see any more bees, chiquita, tell me. The bees will bring back the rain.”

Carol passes the summer listening to her grandfather’s made-up stories about a desert town that centered around a tree that healed injuries, where nobody every left, and where babies took years to become children. Telling these stories, Serge is the most lucid, especially when describing his wife, Rosa, Carolina’s grandmother.

“Every step she took, bees followed her in a halo around her head. They trailed behind her wherever she went. No one else in the village had the bees follow when they walked; only Rosa. No one knew why, but no one really asked why—the village had plenty of mysteries. Bigger mysteries.”

The longer Carolina stays in the desert, the more vivid these stories become until she thinks they might just be real. And why are there bees in the middle of a desert that only she can see? And her grandfather’s stories can’t be true—not when he describes a tree that gave a village life, and trees like that don’t grow in the desert.

Lindsay Eagar’s writing is lyrical, speaking of a landscape that, in the middle of its harshness, hides truly beautiful magic within. Hour of the Bees is magical-realism at its best for young readers.

Lindsay Eagar, author of Hour of the Bees

Keeping Family Secrets

Alice Hoffman

When Alice Hoffman spoke with us about Nightbird recently in an interview for SLJ's Curriculum Connections, she talked about its origins as a story about the isolation that comes from secrets. For Twig Fowler, that secret involves a family curse that has rendered her older brother half-human, half-bird.

Q: Nightbird shares a melding of magic and realism that’s present in your books for young adults, Green Angel and Aquamarine, and your adult novels. What is it about that combination that compels you as a writer?

Alice Hoffman: My childhood reading was fairy tales, and even though they were magical, they felt the most real. In terms of what was happening emotionally and psychologically, even if the story was about a beast or a rose that wouldn’t die, there were truths there. That the magical and the real exist side by side makes sense to me. I always think of myself as a 12-year-old reader…[and] write the book that I want to read.

Q: Where did the idea of Nightbird come from?
AH: This story is about the isolation that comes from secrets. I think many kids know about family secrets, and they know they’re not supposed to discuss them.

Q: What was the inspiration of James’s curse? I thought of the Minotaur—because of his birthright, he’s confined to this half-man, half-creature body. It’s that idea of the sins of the father visited upon the son, isn’t it?
AH: The idea of a family curse, especially one that isn’t talked about, is ancient, whether from father to son or mother to daughter. It’s like the secret of the nursery: you know it even when you don’t know it.

Also, the monster in the family is a common mythological situation. Nightbird came to me as the story of a “monster’s” sister—one who knows that her sibling is not a monster. How you appear on the outside isn’t necessarily how you are inside. Kids at this age intrinsically know that.

Q: It appears that Twig’s mother moved to New York to escape the fact that everyone knows everyone’s business.
AH: Yes, but you carry your legacy with you. That’s what happened to her. I thought of this as a mother-daughter book…. It’s about understanding your parent a little bit [better]. You can never know your mother when she was younger. Twig’s mother, too, doesn’t really know Twig.

This is an excerpt from a longer interview first published in SLJ's Curriculum Connections.