Review: Lost in the Beehive by Michele Young-Stone

Reviewed by Natalie Sypolt

Lost in the Beehive
A novel by Michele Young-Stone
Simon & Schuster, April 2018
$16.00, 298 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1451657647

We’re all familiar with the phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and generally accept this as true; however, what about magic? Can the line between magic and reality also be as much about perception as about what is being perceived? In Lost in the Beehive, the third novel from Michele Young-Stone, Gloria, the narrator, must believe in the magic of her world in order to survive; Gloria—and Young-Stone—only ask only that the readers believe along with them.

Young-Stone is the rare writer who, like her characters, is able to perceive the magic in the world, even when the world is not spinning in the right direction. Through her novels—Lost in the Beehive, as well as her earlier Above Us Only Sky and Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors—Young-Stone manages to show how even terrible experiences can, and often do, have a beautiful side. Gloria must experience the pain of being sent away to a gay conversion institution so that she can meet Sheff, the boy who would become the first true love of her life; Sheff is lost to her, but always manages to show up—in the bees, in a fortune teller’s message—when Gloria needs him most. How would she have survived if she’d never met him? If she’d had to do the courageous act of living in a world not quite meant for her all alone?

The story begins in the 1960s, fittingly an era in American history when young people across the country were rebelling from the constricting lives of their parents in order to find their own identities. Gloria spends most of her life doing this exact thing—looking for the true space that she can feel as herself, not the ill-fitting one she’d be squeezed into. As a teen, Gloria knew she was gay, though she didn’t put words to it, and when she was caught in a compromising position with another girl, her parents sent her to the Belmont Institute where she would be “cured” of her perceived depravity. Gloria’s parents were trying to help her, and when it became clear that they had made a mistake, they brought Gloria home for good; Sheffield Schoeffler’s father, though, was more concerned with how Sheff’s homosexuality would make others perceive him (not Sheff), and was determined that Sheff would return to Belmont until he was “normal”. “Here goes,” Sheff told Gloria after first met. “I was a pretentious faggot menace. I came here last year, and they cured me of pretentiousness, but not the faggot-menace bit, and apparently, that’s the real problem. Who knew?”

Early on in the novel, Sheff and Gloria visit the Coney Island psychic Madame Zelda. Zelda tells Gloria, “The bees came with you, girl.” Though Sheffield dies tragically, both literally and metaphorically running from his father, Gloria feels him with her throughout her life, usually coming to her when she needed friendship the most, often in the form of bees, quietly buzzing and humming in an outbuilding or pantry shelf. “Sheff is with the bees,” Gloria thinks, when she sees the honeybees in the house she is to share with her new husband, whom she marries in an attempt to live a “normal” life.  “That’s how it felt. That’s what I needed to believe,” she says. Years later, Gloria finds herself in Madame Zelda’s tent again and the now old woman says to her, “What are you doing to the boy?…You’re doing something to make the boy upset…The boy wants you to be happy.”

Throughout her life, Gloria uses her own form of “magical thinking” to survive. The bees comfort her through her abusive marriage, and when she eventually meets Betty, the bees show themselves again and let her know that she was finally on the right path. When Gloria shows Betty the “beehive situation” in her pantry, she says, “It’s like a universe right there.”

In Gloria’s own beehive universe, too often those who are meant to protect her, end up hurting her—parents, doctors, a husband—while things presumed to be dangerous—like the bees—guard her like their queen. Those who claim to have her best interests in mind all set out with what they believe are good intentions, but what they perceive as right and good, is the opposite of what Sheff and Gloria need most to be. Lost in the Beehive forces readers to examine their own notions about what is “good” and “right.” “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” we say, but we must remember that just because a beholder—or even many beholders—does not understand the beauty, that thing is not necessarily ugly. A weed is only a weed instead of a flower because someone has called it so; Gloria is only wrong in her love for another woman because someone believes it so. Fortunately, Gloria is eventually able to find her way into a life that fits her and, at the end of this novel, finds the freedom to not only tell Sheff’s story, but also her own.

Natalie Sypolt is the author of The Sound of Holding Your Breath: Stories, published in November 2018 by West Virginia University Press. Her work has been published in Appalachian Heritage, Kenyon Review Online, Willow Springs Review, and Glimmer Train, among other fine journals. Natalie is the winner of the Glimmer Train New Writers Award, the West Virginia Fiction Award, and the Betty Gabehart Prize. Currently she lives in West Virginia where she teaches writing and literature.