Starting Over: A Country Year and A Book of Bees

by Sue Hubbell

A pair of memoirs about a woman starting her life over as a beekeeper in the Ozarks, from “a latter-day Henry Thoreau with a sense of the absurd” (Chicago Tribune).   Taken together, the “steadily eloquent” national bestseller, A Country Year, and its follow-up, A Book of Bees, a New York Times Notable Book, offer a moving and fascinating chronicle of Sue Hubbell’s seasonal second life as a commercial beekeeper (The Washington Post).   Alone on a small Missouri farm after the end of a thirty-year marriage, Hubbell found a new love—of the winged, buzzing variety. Left with little but the commercial beekeeping and honey-producing business she started with her husband, Hubbell found solace in the natural world, as well as in writing about her experience. In evocative vignettes, she takes readers through the seasonal cycle of her life as a beekeeper, offering exquisitely rendered details of hives, harvests, and honey, while also reflecting on deeper questions. As the New York Times “The real masterwork that Sue Hubbell has created is her life.”

Genres: Nature, Memoir, Autobiography

450 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 10, 2018

About the author

Sue Hubbell is a graduate of the Universtiy of Southern California. She received a master's degree in library science from the Drexel Institute of Technology and was a librarian at Brown University. In addition to her books she has written for Time Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, The New Yorker, the New York Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She currently resides in Maine.

Reviews

[Missy LeBlanc Ivey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed "A Country Year" more than "A Book of Bees", but that is probably because I don't know a thing about raising honeybees or taking care of their hives, which seems to entail a lot work with energy I don't have. All the detailed explanations and descriptions of the ins-and-outs of hive management was very difficult to follow along. I'm one who would need to watch a video before diving into a hobby like this, but she does tell you just about everything you need to know to understand the interesting nature of bees as well. After watching a video for better understanding of hive management, I would definitely come back to this book for another read, which should be on every beekeepers bookshelf.

In "A Country Year", the author tells little short stories of her experiences and lessons learned from nature while harvesting honey from her honeybees on her, roughly, 100 acre farm in the Ozarks in Missouri. Although 50 years old and just divorced, she hardly lets you in on the details of her starting over on her own, or even the hardships. She's a very fluid writer.

Her father, a botanist, taught her to love, care, appreciate, and have great respect for all things in nature. This book is more about that appreciation and love for nature, which is why I really enjoyed it. A part of her personality is just like mine. She loves weeds, and so do I. When we come across an unfamiliar weed or insect, we both go to extremes to find out what it's all about. Is it native? Is it beneficial? For whom or what? What is its purpose? We want to know everything about it, and then...let it be.

One of her long time friends was a botanist and an artist who liked to draw the wildflowers or weeds that she came across to help her remember the details about them. A great idea, and something I would love to start doing. It's about slowing down.

[Linda Blackburn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very educational

This book taught me a lot about beekeeping. Mostly I loved her description of nature taking over and the way it all works when we leave it alone.