It’s a ‘follow-up,’ not a sequel: Author Eileen Garvin returns for Northwest Passages on novel ‘Bumblebee Season’

With bees as a story-telling vehicle, Eileen Garvin’s latest novel explores something anyone can relate to: the search for human connection for those feeling out of place.

National bestselling author Garvin will be making her homecoming to Spokane on April 29, where she will return to the Northwest Passages stage for a discussion of her latest book “Bumblebee Season.”

Her third novel is in line with her past writing: exploring complicated characters searching for belonging and crossing paths in an unlikely, Pacific Northwestern setting.

“Bumblebee Season” is set in 2019 Hood River, Oregon, where Garvin resides with her husband and dog, Maggie. The book switches perspectives between three characters, each feeling alienated for vastly different reasons.

It’s a feeling anyone can relate to, Garvin said.

“There is very much this search for home and belonging, which is really what all my books are about,” Garvin said. “I think being a human being is difficult and uncomfortable, and all of these characters are certainly trying to find their feet.”

First, the reader is introduced to Abigail Plue, a graduate student of entomology at Oregon State University. Removed from a teaching assistant position after yelling at an undergrad, she is sent on a research mission with fellow scholars to search for the threatened Western bumblebee, a native pollinator in the Mount Hood area. She has undiagnosed autism, Garvin said; she struggles to make friends but is adept at identifying bees.

Meanwhile young beekeeper Jake Stevenson, a protagonist in Garvin’s first novel, is overwhelmed with the success of honey sales at his fledgling operation. Heartbroken, he sinks his time and energy into his hives but is unable to find adequate help to sustain the booming business.

Enter teenager Flaco Lopez, an unaccompanied migrant who meets Jake in a chance alpine encounter in Hood River after traveling more than 2,600 miles from his village in Mexico. For 14 years, he had the belonging each character is searching for with his mother in his hometown, until the threat of forced gang initiation compels him to unwillingly migrate North.

“He and real life immigrants like him, they leave behind their homes forever,” Garvin said. “In a lot of cases, especially right now, even if you’re a legal immigrant in this country, people are very nervous about going home right now, to travel and see family. You lose the place that you were born – where your family is rooted.”

Garvin said “Bumblebee Season” isn’t technically a sequel, but a “follow-up” to her first novel, “The Music of Bees.” Garvin said when she published her debut novel in 2021, hungry readers would ask her if she was working on a sequel.

“I’d say, ‘Well, no, everybody’s so happy.’ I’ve sort of solved their problems and I’ve left everyone in such good shape,” she said of the three main characters in “The Music of Bees.” Those protagonists return in “Bumblebee Season.”

Jake, one of the returning characters, uses a wheelchair after an accident at a high school party left him paraplegic. The character was inspired years ago serendipitously, Garvin said, by a pedestrian she saw before she began writing fiction.

“He was in a wheelchair and had this tremendous Mohawk,” she said, describing the young man. “River County doesn’t have lots of either of those things.”

Jake’s character is further explored in her second novel after Garvin met the woman who inspired “Bumblebee Season” at a recent beekeeping conference, a hobby of Garvin’s since before she started publishing books.

The woman, Naomi Price, also used a wheelchair and invented an accessible hive that is healthier for its buzzing inhabitants.

“I meet Naomi Price, I’m thinking about bumblebees, I get in the car to drive home, and it all just came to me,” she said. “I was like, ‘I have to go back now to Jacob, and Jacob’s gonna have access to these super cool hives, and that’s going to be a plot point.’ ”

Though Price died last year, her legacy lives on in her signature horizontal hives that Garvin uses in her own backyard and in her fictional world.

Garvin’s book is rife with scientific information about pollinators and the logistics of beekeeping, topics she’s long interested in as a “wanna-be biologist” and uses books as an excuse to learn more.

It’s also a fitting avenue to bring the characters what they’re after most: connection, Garvin said.

“Beekeeping, having my characters talking about that, it was a very handy way to introduce the readers to them, but also for them to introduce themselves to each other,” she said.

Garvin will be interviewed by Spokesman-Review outdoors columnist Ammi Midstokke at a Northwest Passages book club event at 7 p.m. April 29 at the Bing Crosby Theater.