The marketing copy for this book on Goodreads starts out by calling it “The Handmaid’s Tale meets The Hunger Games”. I cannot imagine a human being reading the book and naturally coming up with that description. I assume some unfortunate intern is being forced at gunpoint to try to relate every new release to a hyper-recognizable bestseller, no matter how tortured the comparison may be.
Anyway, the same marketing copy goes on to call the book a “brilliantly imagined debut”, and with that part I wholeheartedly agree. The Bees is, more than anything else, a tour of the lives and lifecycle of bees, with enough anthropomorphizing thrown in to keep it engaging. By just having you imagine yourself in the mind and body of one of these real creatures, Paull manages to create an experience that feels more alien (in a good way) than many sci-fi novels about aliens.