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Gene Stratton-Porter (A Girl of the Limberlost; Laddie) was a writer whose primary interest was the natural world. In The Keeper of the Bees, her last novel, she brought to vivid life the coastline, flora, and fauna of her adopted California.
Jamie MacFarlane has returned a hero from the Great War but with a stubborn chest wound. The government has sent him to their new thermal springs hospital in California “where it was hoped that the brilliant sunshine, the fruits, and the clean air, the eternal summer of a beneficent land” would heal him. But nothing has worked and with his parents now deceased and no one to care for him, it seems the next step is a camp rife with tuberculosis. Realizing this, Jamie begins his Great Adventure on foot toward the ocean.
For miles, he encounters both sympathy and villainy and just as his own strength is at its lowest ebb, he finds salvation when he encounters an elderly gentleman who’s in worse shape than he is. Jamie agrees to take on the gentleman’s work tending his bees, aided by his assistant, the precocious 10-year-old Little Scout.
The Pacific Ocean air, ripe fruits, and exercise are certainly beneficial but it’s not until Jamie begins to think beyond his own mortality that he truly begins to heal. His natural empathy, his work among the bees, new friendships, and a mysterious young woman may be the keys to a new life and his cure.
About the bees: ever the naturalist, Stratton-Porter delivers, through the Little Scout’s child-like tutorial to Jamie, the clearest explanation ever written of the complicated society of these fascinating creatures.
