Set in a post-apocalyptic future where all honey bees and other pollinating insects are extinct, Julie Carrick Dalton’s THE LAST BEEKEEPER is for those who have wondered what the world would look like if Bee Movie didn’t have a happy ending. After 10 years of worldwide hunger from the pollinators’ “Great Collapse,” the world welcomes a precarious and unevenly distributed sense of stability.

Dalton does not enlist a lazy Star Wars opening crawl to give her audience all the necessary backstory; she wrote a novel, not a book review that no one will read. Her worldbuilding process is world-class.

"THE LAST BEEKEEPER offers plenty of post-apocalyptic details to feed fans of THE ROAD and 'The Walking Dead,' but Dalton also weaves a complex family history, internal struggles and ambitions within Sasha that will appeal to anyone who appreciates compelling and creative storytelling."

Sasha Severn returns to her childhood farmhouse via a busing service. Enough pieces of our society have survived into the future that Dalton has created. Yes, it’s a harsh future, but she almost invisibly conveys how it’s not a complete deterioration of civilization. With a mere mention of how Sasha got herself to the beginning of the story, readers grasp that THE LAST BEEKEEPER is not Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD, a common trope of post-apocalypse where everything, everywhere and everyone is bleak, miserable and violent.

Sasha encounters squatters who have claimed her abandoned farmhouse, and she finagles a one-week stay. The daughter of the last beekeeper, Lawrence Severn, she is determined to hide her identity and attachment to the property. Dalton revisits parts of Sasha’s childhood as a concise way of explaining how she helped her father hide the last of his hives before he and his research were confiscated by the government. He instructs Sasha never to reveal that some bees escaped and to keep secret the hidden research in their storm bunker, which would have exonerated him and freed her from state care.

When it’s reported that Lawrence’s parole was denied due to his dementia, the squatters agree that he is the filth that condemned humanity to its current struggles. Though Sasha resents the myriad of times her father chose his work over her, she fights to keep her mouth shut whenever he is slandered. When her week is up and the squatters still allow her to stay, she keeps her secret so they won’t know she has lied to them from the start.

When Sasha and her newfound family are hired by the nearby greenhouses, she realizes that her Uncle Chuck is in charge. Dalton offers more details surrounding Lawrence’s arrest and Chuck’s relationship with Sasha during this difficult time.

A handful of times on the property, Sasha sees a honey bee land on her, an impossibility that she chalks up to being an hallucination. Just before she is called into Chuck’s office about a promotion, a similar encounter convinces her that these “mirages” are real. She sticks to her father’s instructions, but her secrets soon begin to unravel in front of the people she loves and those she fears. She faces the question of why her secrets matter. Do the powers-that-be want bees back for themselves, or would they like to ensure that the return of the bees does not impact their stranglehold on a recovering world?

THE LAST BEEKEEPER offers plenty of post-apocalyptic details to feed fans of THE ROAD and “The Walking Dead,” but Dalton also weaves a complex family history, internal struggles and ambitions within Sasha that will appeal to anyone who appreciates compelling and creative storytelling. It is quite refreshing to read a dystopian work where the author does not interrupt the momentum of the tale with endless backstory. The book manages to make readers feel like they’re ordinary citizens, used to the ins and outs of a pollinator-less world, because they can piece the setting together from Dalton’s subtle hints. As an aspiring author myself, I took many notes.