How to Bee Cover

How to Bee

Peony lives with her sister and grandfather on a fruit farm outside the city. In a world where real bees are extinct, the quickest, bravest kids climb the fruit trees and pollinate the flowers by hand. All Peony really wants is to be a bee. Life on the farm is a scrabble, but there is enough to eat and a place to sleep, and there is love. Then Peony's mother arrives to take her away from everything she has ever known,

“Sometimes bees get too big to be up in the branches, sometimes they fall and break their bones. This week both happened and Foreman said, 'Tomorrow we'll find two new bees.'"

How To Bee is a beautiful and fierce novel for younger readers, and the voice of Peony will stay with you long after you read the last page.

The Huffington Post article that started it all.

Teaching resources at Allen & Unwin

Reviews
I didn't know I was going to love this book so much. It really hits all the right beats and it made me sob more than once, and laugh out loud at times, and uses its setting - a near future Australia that verges on dystopic but doesn't quite tip over the edge - to excellent advantage.
Tehani Croft
How To Bee is enchanting and atmospheric. Captivating until the final page.
Kelly @ DivaBookNerd
The story grabs you and won't let you go, right until the end. No wonder this book is winning awards left, right and centre. Mid graders with a leaning towards nature will fall in love with How to Bee...and probably everyone else will too.
Julie Murphy
Peony, the young heroine - and she really is in every sense of the word - in MacDibble's gripping middle grade novel, radiates tenacity, kindness and sass so loudly, her voice really will be resounding long after you read the last page.
Dimity Powell
awards

  • Winner: Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year 2018 - Younger readers
  • Winner: New Zealand Book Awards CYA - Junior Fiction (the Wright Family Foundation Esther Glen Award) 2018
  • Winner: Patricia Wrightson Prize, NSW Premiers Awards, 2018
  • Shortlisted: Queensland Literary Prize
  • Shortlisted: South Australian Festival Literary Prize
  • Shortlisted: Norma K Heming Award
  • Shortlisted: Aurealis Award
  • Shortlisted: Ditmar Award
  • Shortlisted: Book of the Year, Speech Pathology Australia
  • Longlisted: The North Somerset Teachers' Book Awards, UK

Audio Books