THE BEEKEEPER'S QUESTION

In Baldwin’s debut historical novel, World War II tests people on the battlefield and on the home front in a small Montana town.

Around 1937,Maire MacDonnell, a 16-year-old girl from Northern Ireland, flees to America to escape homicidal bully Broin Mulvaney. Four years later, she falls in love with young American Franklin Cooper, who’s about to ship out as a signal corpsman. They marry and Frank sends her—pregnant—to live with his family in Pigeon River, Montana. Meanwhile, Mulvaney has sworn to track her down; he’s always on her mind, a living nightmare. Frank is stationed in Tunisia, and the story toggles between there and Pigeon River, where readers meet Leo Cooper, Frank’s father, who’s a beekeeper and Methodist minister; Jereldene “Doc” Jesperson, the town doctor; Jesse Cooper, Frank’s drifter brother who finds out that he has Native American ancestry; and the Blackfoot tribe who took him in. Jesse eventually returns home with a Blackfoot wife, Willow, and their toddler son, Drummond. Pigeon River has its own troubles involving food quotas and a lack of farm workers, due to the war overseas. Jesse strikes a deal to bring Indigenous men to town to work, which lays bare local racism: “The red world is full of hurt, and the white world is full of hate,” says one Indigenous character. Frank returns home, but deeply damaged in body and soul. How will things work out for him and his loved ones? And will Mulvaney find Maire? Overall, Baldwin delivers an impressive and skillfully written novel. Amid the realism of wartime life, mystical visitations—involving bees and their hive wisdom, or Maire’s grandmother and faerie wisdom—intriguingly come to characters who are open to them. The story also effectively explores Leo’s troubled relationship with his sons. Doc Jesperson is a wonderful, memorable character as well, a no-nonsense professional who’s as deeply compassionate as she is skilled; Baldwin shows how she and Leo manage to hold the town together. Indeed, Doc’s confrontation with a bigoted character is one that would have been worthy of a Frank Capra movie.

A warmhearted and fulfilling wartime family saga.