The Hive

*Winner 2021 Indie Best Contest*
*Finalist for American Book Fest's 2021 Best Book Award*
Rural Missouri, a hot summer day on the Mississippi River during the Great Recession. The four Fehler sisters want to be more than "bug girls" in their family's fourth-generation pest control business, but their path is fixed. When the patriarch suddenly dies, and his succession goes according to plan but not expectation, they each must plot a course for themselves in uncertain and changing times. Through it all, their mother, Grace, weighs her own choices, and whether her passion to save her family as a doomsday prepper also includes blowing up her world with a forbidden romance.
In their small town and around the dinner table, the Fehlers embody Midwestern resilience as they come together to save the company's finances and the family's future, and work to preserve what they have by evolving as a hive. Once again, Flood author Melissa Scholes Young has readers buzzing with the story of an unforgettable family, grieving, and rising again.
"You'll buzz through The Hive, Melissa Scholes Young's vibrant second novel about a close family and their closely held secrets . . . A loving portrait of a family that closes ranks even as it opens its heart." -Mary Kay Zuravleff, author of Man Alive!
"I love books about sisters, and I love The Hive, which has all the eccentricity and yearning of some of my favorite sister stories, like We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson and Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns. From the very first chapter, The Hive is a deft, delightfully weird, and often comical family saga." -Timothy Schaffert, author of The Perfume Thief