The Poet and the Bees: A Story of the Seasons Sylvia Plath Kept Bees
by Amy Novesky; illus. by Jessica Love
Primary, Intermediate    Viking    32 pp.
2/25    9780593526392    $18.99
e-book ed.  9780593526408    $10.99

Novesky provides a snapshot of Plath (1932–1963) inspired by her poems and letters about her brief experience with beekeeping. The text moves through the seasons, beginning and ending with spring, in spare, graceful free-verse poems with hints of rhyme and steady internal rhythm and occasionally incorporating (in italics) Plath’s own words and phrases: “It is the golden season. / Everything glowing as if lit from within. / The poet can glow and burn, / as if lit from within, too.” Practical details about beekeeping are integrated, such as proper garb, how to check a hive and frame, getting stung, pollination, and the production of honey. Love’s watercolor illustrations depict Plath (and her braided “crown” of hair) caring for bees and writing poetry as well as the landscape, flowers, and vegetation and many bees up close and in swirls and swarms. The tension between Plath’s melancholic moods and lyrical poetry and the hopeful, careful process of beekeeping is captured beautifully here. In the endnote, Novesky provides a brief biographical sketch of Plath and explains her motivation for this story: she wanted readers (who may here be encountering Plath for the first time) to know that the poet was “so much more than her legendary death.”

From the March/April 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.