A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings is a retrospective and philosophical musing over the author's year as a novice beekeeper. Originally published in 2018, this American edition is due out 5th May 2020 from Knopf Doubleday on their Pantheon imprint, it's 256 pages and will be available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats.

I'm fond of natural philosophy and I'm a beekeeper and (fanatical) gardener. I was excited to find this book and really enjoyed reading it. It has garnered numerous comparisons to H is for Hawk, which is maybe somewhat apt in that they're both introspective memoirs by British women with more than a little life examination and personal philosophy included, but where MacDonald is dour and fierce in voice, Jukes is more gentle, humorous, bewildered, and full of ennui. I found a much more apt comparison with Sue Hubbell's work.

Either way, I found this a worthwhile and relaxing read. There's no distinct narrative arc or distinctly promoted message. There is introspection and historical comparison against the cycle of seasons and lives, human and insect.

Beautifully and lyrically written. Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Helen Jukes is feeling disconnected and stuck in the day-to-day of a monotonous job- something needs to give. In an effort to make her new home and garden more lively, as well as to bring some purpose back into her life, Helen decides to start beekeeping. This book is a biography of Helen Jukes' year of beekeeping, but also ends up being fairly educational to the reader on the subject of beekeeping.

The concept behind this book had me intrigued, and I still think this is an incredibly interesting story to write. The opening imagery of the garden was well-written and I liked how she described the impulsivity of deciding to get her own bees to liven up the place after learning how to care for them occasionally from a friend of a friend who keeps bees. I also found that I liked the idea that in this work life that she's struggling to find herself in, where she's killing plants on her desk and her coworker comments on the "madness" of the idea of her keeping bees, that she is motivated to do it and embark on this journey regardless.

What I didn't like was that after just a few chapters I found this book to drag. The idea, while amazing, doesn't itself provide a lot of substance for a reader to engage with unless there is enough subplot going on to keep the reader entertained. I understand this is obviously non-fiction, but when this feels mostly educational/informational it's harder to stay interested the entire way through.

I really did love this entire idea, that this woman who is unfulfilled did something productive and good, and it was for her own happiness. I wanted to love this more than I did just for that.

Thank you to Helen Jukes, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and Netgalley for giving me this DRC in exchange for an honest review.

“The hive has become a counterweight to a work environment I’ve been finding stressful. I’ve begun to relax out here; to drop some rigid outer casings that were holding me stiffly and rather unhappily in place. The bees are hot and busy inside the hive, and maybe if I can understand them better I might learn something important about how to live.”

A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings is a memoir by British writer, beekeeper and tutor, Helen Jukes. Now in Oxford with a new job, Helen Jukes decides she may want to keep bees. As it’s November, she won’t be able to get her own colony until the spring, so she fills the time learning all she can about them: ancient and more recent history, hives, habits. As she does her research she is “becoming less and less convinced that it’s possible to be a purely rational and detached observer of the natural world – or if that’s all we’d want to go on, if it were.”

“All of the movements and change of the last few years - the string of houses and jobs, the roving friendships – has put me in the habit of expecting things to disappear quickly once found, and in that state of almost permanent temporariness I’ve caught myself wondering a few times if it’s very reasonable to hope to keep anything at all. No wonder the arrival of a colony of bees is triggering my anxieties. Here I am pondering impermanence, having just tasked myself with the responsibility of keeping something – with sustaining it. A colony is not a book or an archivable object and you can’t hold it in a glass cabinet or on a shelf. It is live and shifting and if this one doesn’t take to our little rectangular space it’ll be put of here faster than you can say swarm.”

The pace is sedate: there’s no major action and the bees don’t even turn up until March. But it’s interesting and, surprisingly, quite moving at times, and Jukes makes many insightful observations about life, about the world we live in and our attitude to it. The prose is often beautiful and with the perilous state of bees in today’s world, it’s a timely read. An outstanding debut.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday