The Bee Maker by Mobi Warren
Reviewed by Pamela Overeynder
This treasure of a book, written for young adults, is an intergenerational jewel. My grandmother heart loved it. Beekeepers and lovers of life will love it. Ecologists, earth keepers, and nature lovers of every stripe will find solace and inspiration in these pages. Lovers of math and ancient Greece will be intrigued by it. Part science fiction, part love story, part spiritual revelation, part mystery novel—food for heart and soul. A book of exquisite wisdom. Warren’s writing style is pure prose poetry.
There is so much to say about this book, small in size and vast in meanings. The story begins in 2036—a mere fifteen years from now. One of the central themes of the book is the way past and future belong to each other. Time is circular and if one finds the portal, the past and the present can interact, confer wisdom, and even heal each other. Warren seamlessly weaves the present—a changed world where honey bees have gone nearly extinct—with ancient Greece in ways that will surprise and delight.
Warren is a retired math teacher and her love of mathematics shines through these silvery pages. Pythagoras, a 6th century BCE mathematician and philosopher travelled widely in the ancient world. Some believed he had the capacity to travel through space/time. Warren cleverly uses Pythagoras to unlock the mathematics of origami—unknown to the ancient world—to save the bees in present time and the life of a small boy in ancient Crete. Interestingly, origami is an art form based on mathematics. The crease patterns follow certain mathematic principles. Ah, but I’m getting ahead of the story.
The central character, thirteen-year-old Melissa Bùi, begins folding origami bees as a way to offer hope and encouragement to her father. Paul Bùi is a research scientist who specializes in honey bee communication. He’s desperately trying to save the last honey bees from extinction. Melissa hopes to win his affections with her commitment to fold 1,000 origami bees, just as people of Japan fold paper cranes to promote peace. Warren herself has twice folded 1,000 origami cranes. Melissa’s mother is an archeologist who happens to be doing research in Greece for the summer on a tiny island off the coast of Crete. In the ruins of an ancient shrine, she finds a small bronze figurine of a victorious female runner some 2,600 years ago. The same runner Melissa will soon encounter.
Melissa begins the daunting task “like a secret prayer for the bees’ survival.” Magic unfolds. While accompanying her father on a honey bee caper to steal one of the last colonies of bees from a California almond farm in order to save the bees, she hears the sound of exotic music. She is being called from another time and place. What follows is an unforgettable adventure. I won’t spoil the story with more details. The modern and ancient worlds come together in the deft hands of Warren’s prose to tell a story more complete than past or present could imagine.
I hope this brief description will get you interested enough to read the novel. The story is, itself, an exquisite origami to be enjoyed in its wholeness, and to bed slowly unfolded, discovering the crease patterns, mathematically based, that themselves are the blueprint for creation—whether origami bee or a livable future. Healing, Warren seems to say, is deeply connected with the power to create. The created being, like the creator, takes on a life of its own. What Warren has created with the Bee Maker is a memorable story that offers hope for the survival of humanity.
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