A novel about the families we choose for ourselves, by masterful storyteller Eileen Garvin

BEE MUSIC
by Eileen Garvin
Dutton, pub. date TBD

Alice Holtzman is demographically unfashionable: middle-aged, childless, introverted, and more concerned with a job well done than how she looks doing it. After the sudden death of her husband, she starts having panic attacks. It’s in the grips of one of these attacks that she hits Jake—a troubled, paraplegic teenager with the tallest mohawk in the Pacific Northwest—with her pickup truck. Oh, and did we mention that truck was full of 120,000 restless honeybees? Everyone is surprised when Alice lets Jake move onto her farm, and even more surprised when she hires Harry, a bumbling twenty-something with a sketchy past, to help her with her apiary. When a nefarious pesticide company threatens the local honeybee population, this unlikely trio unites to defend the bees, and, in the process, forge a path out of their respective griefs.

Eileen Garvin was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She completed her B.A. in English at Seattle University, and her M.A. in English at the University of New Mexico. She writes for newspapers, magazines, and websites from Hood River, Oregon, where she lives with her husband.