An interesting read, a bit slow at times but different from a lot of things I’ve read. It’s a real page turner, a story of pain, forgiveness , growth and of course the bees. A beautiful memoir and story of surviving a dysfunctional mother into her grandfather’s love.  

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest review

4.5 stars
I’m not a great reader of memoirs but I do love bees, so that drew me to this book. When she is five years old, Meredith and her brother are taken to California by their mother when she and their father divorce. They live with her grandparents. Grandpa keeps bees on a fairly large scale and teaches the young Meredith about them. Her mother is obviously unstable, her grandmother cold and, to my view, cruel. I wanted to shake her grandpa to make him stand up for the children, but his method of supporting them was different.
Meredith began to compare and contrast the cooperative and altruistic life of the bees to her own car-crash of a family unit. I admired her later understanding of her mother and grandmother. It is no thanks to them that she turned into an empathic adult. The only slight downside, for me, was that this felt at times like a beekeeping manual. It was necessary to have Grandpa’s lessons in there but occasionally they repeated things we’d been told before. It’s a tough, thought-provoking but enjoyable read and it must have taken a huge amount of courage to write and publish it.

The Honey Bus of the title is an army surplus truck converted by Meredith May's  step-grandfather into a homespun honey bottling plant. In her grandfather's company, she learns about the secret life of bees and the craft of the beekeeper. As she grows older her grandfather conveys life lessons by using the bees as examples of the proper way to behave. 

With the help of her grandfather and the bees, she navigates her parents broken marriage and her mother's inability to mother, born of an abusive childhood.

This is an exemplary work of creative nonfiction. A factually accurate story of real people and events is presented in a very compelling, vivid, and dramatic way..