Review: Bee Speaker by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Disclaimer: I received an advanced reader copy of this book via NetGalley and my opinion is entirely my own.

Adrian Tchaikovsky has built a career out of personifying the other. From the spiders in Children of Time, to the Shrouded in Shroud, Tchaikovsky has a knack for instilling emotional heart into monstrous and scary creatures.

The Dogs of War series is no exception. Featuring bear scholars, war machine dogs and hyper-intelligent bees, the series is built on putting the person into the monster and the monster into the person. Bee Speaker continues this theme and does a brilliant job at it.

Set well into the future, after the collapse of Earth society, a group of Martians, bioforms and modified humans alike, receive a signal requesting help from Earth and set out to do just that.

What follows is an enduring mystery that slowly unravels, as the Martians struggle to acclimatise to Earth in both a physical sense, and a societal one. The story is delivered across multiple perspectives, with each character having well-defined and unique voices. The perspective shifts serve to show the narrative in different lights and fleshes out the story. Tchaikovsky masterfully builds the tension in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout. Irae is a standout character, a “glass lizard” who teeters on the edge of madness, blurring the lines between person and monster. Tchaikovsky uses a unique prose style for Irae that is in itself skitterish and unstable that really builds on the character.

Bee Keeper really is a spectacular novel and well worth the read, even if you haven't read the prior ones in the series. While they are set in the same universe, the Dogs of War books quite easily can be read as standalone novels. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Tchaikovsky is fast becoming one of my favourite authors.

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