Love and identity are timeless themes, expressed in every story in some way or another, it seems. Amanda Cox breaks these down in a tale of two women in He Should Have Told The Bees. Beckett Walsh’s father made a comfortable world for his beloved daughter on the farm they shared alone after her mother left them. She was his apprentice and was happy to carry on in his shadow until his death ripped away the security she relied on even more than she had known. Callie Peterson had no such stability in a world without a father and with a mother whose addictions stole any illusion of security. She should have been through living with the weight of her mother’s continued rejection and chaos, but the boundaries she so carefully constructed are torn down again by her mother’s pleas for help. There is no reason why Beckett or Callie should know about the other’s existence, until George Walsh’s trust divides his estate in half between them. Where each woman has struggled for a lifetime to understand who they are and why they weren’t enough for their parents to stay, this pivotal point begins a new search for understanding neither ever expected.
He Should Have Told The Bees is both heart wrenching and soul stirring, as Cox explores issues we all wrestle with, and does it in a manner that has the reader invested from the first appearance of a spunky alien waif in the Walsh Farms apiary. I have to confess that I was listening to an audiobook in which a spunky alien waif pops up in the path of an unsuspecting young woman, so I had to put He Should Have Told The Bees down for a time in order to keep the storylines from getting jumbled together. I was a bit trepidatious, then, when I resumed this book and hoped it wouldn’t be just another iteration of a storyline I had so recently explored. I worried this one might not hold its own against such a similar cast of characters. There was absolutely no cause for concern. He Should Have Told The Bees is its own story, with its own characters, and there is no confusing the two once those relationships between reader and subjects have been forged. And frankly, Katya Amadeus Cimmaron of the Vesper Galaxy is the kind of lovable, spunky alien waif you just want to scoop up and feed cupcakes. With galaxy frosting. And star sprinkles.
He Should Have Told The Bees by Amanda Cox is available now from your favorite local bookseller or online:
Baker Book House Christian Book Barnes & Noble Amazon
Thank you to the author and publisher for allowing me a copy to read and review. All opinions expressed here are my own and are completely genuine.
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