KEEPER OF THE BEES BY MEG KASSEL
Genre: YA, Fantasy, Paranormal
Source: Entangled Teen Publishing in return for an honest review
Publication Date: September 4th 2018
Synopsis:
Keeper of the Bees is a tale of two teens who are both beautiful and beastly, and whose pasts are entangled in surprising and heartbreaking ways.
Dresden is cursed. His chest houses a hive of bees that he can’t stop from stinging people with psychosis-inducing venom. His face is a shifting montage of all the people who have died because of those stings. And he has been this way for centuries—since he was eighteen and magic flowed through his homeland, corrupting its people.
He follows harbingers of death, so at least his curse only affects those about to die anyway. But when he arrives in a Midwest town marked for death, he encounters Essie, a seventeen-year-old girl who suffers from debilitating delusions and hallucinations. His bees want to sting her on sight. But Essie doesn’t see a monster when she looks at Dresden.
Essie is fascinated and delighted by his changing features. Risking his own life, he holds back his bees and spares her. What starts out as a simple act of mercy ends up unraveling Dresden’s solitary life and Essie’s tormented one. Their impossible romance might even be powerful enough to unravel a centuries-old curse.
*I would like to thank Entangled Teen Publishing for the chance to read and review this book in return for my honest opinion!*
The unique mythology that was first presented in the companion novel, Black Birds of the Gallows, is continued in Keeper of the Bees. We are first introduced to the curse of the bees in the first novel, but are keep quite in the dark about the backstory and details. I enjoyed the first book and found the mythology to be quite intriguing and the story to be unlike anything I had read before. I felt like it left so many questions unanswered and found many of those answers in Keeper of the Bees.
I enjoyed this story so much more than the first. Dresden and his story had me wanting more and to know the why and how of what he was and how he became that way. Although I had slight issues with the romance (a little too insta lovey for me) there were parts of it I understood and like seeing the development. I quite enjoyed the relationship between Dresden and the other harbingers.
Overall this book was a quick read that was layered with mystery and creative mythology that had me guessing until the end. I definitely liked this one better than its companion novel and I am interested to see if there will be another focused on the last mythical being that is only touched on. There is romance, murder and the impending doom that follows the harbingers.
