The Honeybee

"Kirsten Hall (“The Jacket”) teams up with the gently magnificent illustrator Isabelle Arsenault (“Cloth Lullaby,” “Colette’s Lost Pet”) to bring readers the story of one year, from spring to spring, with the honeybees of a single hive. Hall’s charming text proceeds in lightly cadenced lines.... Arsenault’s illustrations capture something of the alien vision of bees — bees see a “bee purple” in flowers that is invisible to us — through a neon orange that she uses sparingly amid paler gouache, pencil and ink landscapes. Her flowers and grasses are drawn impressionistically, while the bees themselves are made more emotionally legible with cartoonish eyes and even smiles. Children will love tracing the erratic paths of the honeybees, and come away with a not too distorted sense of the little honey factory inside the unprepossessing, and previously terrifying, hive. The hexagons of honeycomb, as drawn by Arsenault, seem so perfect as to be fanciful precisely when they are fact."