Sofía Segovia shares that the novel explores both the love of family and the love of land. From Nana Rega losing her child and becoming a wet nurse to the brotherhood between Simonopia and Francisco, Jr., the family bonds are tight and loving. I’m made of everything that touched my senses during that time and entered the part of my brain where I keep my memories… I know a memory from reality, even if I grow more attached to my memories than to reality with each day.” (p. 16) Descriptions of landscape are something the book could use more of to pull together the cornfields, orange groves, towns glimpsed from train windows, caves, slopes, and canyons. These settings are included but not detailed in the ways that would provide a sense of this place as a whole. This may be more an issue for American readers than for Mexican ones, who, perhaps, take this area of northeastern Mexico for granted geographically. What is your reaction to this magical realism? Do you let yourself be immersed in it? Do you ignore or discount it? Have you read other novels that incorporate events that seem just past your periphery of factual? Everyone Knows You Go Home, by Natalia Sylvester has an opening sentence that is one of my favorites of any novel: And the event that starts it all: the discovery, under a bridge, of an infant cloaked in a humming, gentle blanket of bees.

From a beguiling voice in Mexican fiction comes an astonishing novel--her first to be translated into English--about a mysterious child with the power to change a family's history in a country on the verge of revolution. This book tells the story of the Morales family living through the influenza, Mexican Revolution, and the Great Depression. On the surface, the Morales family is portrayed as kind, benevolent, hardworking, deeply devout Catholics who are trying to survive many hardships and hold onto their land. In reality, The Morales were a wealthy, light-skinned privileged family with many means and resources to avoid the tragedies that were striking many poor and indigenous communities. I will give specifics from the book to demonstrate this, but I think it’s important to understand a little bit about the history of Mexico first. What did you know about that pandemic before reading the novel? What did you learn or feel reading the historical fiction account of the pandemic in Linares? Did you find any parallels to Covid-19? Life Gifts Spanish Flu epidemic/Coronavirus pandemic. What particularly stood out was the class aspect –the way that the Linares family could flee to safety felt uncomfortably familiar to the way that primarily wealthier, white-collar people could easily just work from home. Or from Hawaii. Meanwhile –well, we know what happened meanwhile. Segovia shows it in the book, breaking from the Morales focus to write about the suffering and hopelessness of the town they left behind. It just reminded me of the stark contrast of my experience of the pandemic, compared to many others who were put at risk.The Murmur of Bees introduces the reader to a number of characters. This can feel overwhelming in the beginning but they are connected in a delicate manner that over time, as I immersed myself more and more into this book, I liked having all of them around. This book as a whole is a fantastic read and there were three aspects that I enjoyed the most: On Strength Over the ensuing years, the family witnesses marvelous events. Some, like the Spanish Flu of 1917, the 1910 Revolution’s land seizures, or a tenant’s jealousy, prove more tangible threats than demonic possession. Through it all, Simonopio repays the Morales’ kindness many times over: tending the ancient woman who rescued him or retrieving young Francisco Morales when he strays. It’s clear that there is far more to Simonopio than the swarm of bees which follows him everywhere – the Morales have a protector with near-supernatural abilities. Do find this is true? How have your memories been altered with the passage of time? When and how do you remember a photographed experience and when and how do you remember a moment for which you have never seen a photo? Are the qualities of the memory different? Note: as with all of my guides this guide may contain spoilers. I recommend reading the book before the guide. Resources

The author portrays Anselmo (one of the few indgenous people in the book) as ignorant, machisto, violent, ungrateful, selfish, abusive to his children and a murderer, whereas the light-skinned, wealthy Morales family as the fair and rightous. Nana Reja: Nurses Guillermo Morales as a baby after his mother dies in childbirth and becomes a wet nurse in Linares; an old woman by time of this story She might say, When we were girls, Mercedes and I would hide in a hollow in the trunk of a pecan tree so that her sister Luisa wouldn’t find us, but she refused to talk about the last time she saw her friend alive, much less about being unable to attend her funeral or about how that entire family disappeared from this earth in less than three days.” (pp. 85-86) How does the writing style of The Murmur of Bees reflect storytelling? How did you find the non-linear pathways? Were they intriguing? Confusing? Poetic? What other novels have you read with non-linear storylines and how did the arc of those novels unfold?

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Esos cambios entre narrador omnisciente y narrador en segunda persona me parecieron muy idóneos, sobre todo porque esa narrativa en segunda persona correspondía a la perspectiva de un adulto que recordaba su niñez y por momentos la perspectiva era precisamente la de su niñez lo cual resultaba muy ingenioso y divertido para tratar temas importantes. Simonopio brought six-year-old Francisco Junior to school every morning, and one day, they heard an announcement for a show. A man would sing underwater on the upcoming Saturday, and Simonopio agreed to bring Francisco Junior. That Saturday was also Francisco Junior’s seventh birthday. Instead of watching the show, Beatriz and Francisco insisted that he join his father to plant orange trees on Espiricueta’s plot. Simonopio, respecting their time together, resolved to watch the show as planned. Francisco Junior, in the present, allowed himself to remember the rest of this story as the taxi driver drove him through Linares. I have stopped listening, because at the halfway point nothing much has changed and it's either going to happen in the next couple of hours, or at the end, or not at all. The fact that I'm not able to connect with the storytelling halfway in is a sign that I'm most likely going to be even more annoyed if I keep investing.