He Should Have Told the Bees: A Novel

“It’s an old superstition that if the beekeeper dies, you must tell the bees of his passing or the bees will die too.” Walsh Farm is an enchanted land where all the best things in life existed. It represented hard work and productivity and purpose. “Nothing could touch her here in this kingdom…This place is like my Neverland. A place where I am strong, capable. Invincible. Every battle can be won.” Until the owner dies and his daughter Beck discovers she is not the apairy’s only inheritor. Amanda Cox’s He Should Have Told the Bees is a tale of two sisters and the mother who abandoned one and was absent from the other. The only thing they know of their mother’s second life was that she left it. Callie’s whole life has been a desperate mission to build something stead and stable. “Every time I think I am about to arrive in the promised land, Mom shows up and finds a way to drag me back into the wilderness.” In an effort to use the inheritance to pay for their mother’s rehab, Callie is going to have to kick her newfound agoraphobic half sister Beck out of the only home she’s ever known, all for the woman that abandoned them both. But she struggles to justify robbing Beck of the only home she’s ever known to save a mother who was incapable of giving either of them a safe place to land. “In his fallible way,” the death of Beck’s father “brought these three women back together…at the center there was a queen bee who caused them all to gather. But Beck and Callie were not queen bees.” Each was “just a girl clinging to hope for dear life.” Is there room for both of them in this kingdom Beck and her father had loved? A natural body care shop entrepreneur, photographer, beekeeper’s daughter, financial planner, and a sassy sock alien are marked by the crepuscular rays of forgiveness, healing, redemption, romance in the fertile soil where new things could bloom.