Book of the day: Darius Bell and the Crystal Bees by Odo Hirsch
Darius Bell walked up the drive. The gravel crunched under his feet, and Darius smiled as he heard it, feeling like an explorer crunching his way across a dry, rocky desert. But if he was an explorer, he didn’t have far to go. At the end of the drive ahead of him was Bell House, with its clock tower rising above it.
The clock in the tower showed eighteen minutes past eleven. Whether it was eighteen minutes past eleven in the morning or eighteen past eleven at night, no one could have said. For years the clock hadn’t worked at all, but an earth tremor the previous year had got it going again, although irregularly, to say the least. Sometimes it crept forward five times slower than it should have, and sometimes it stood still as if utterly tired out, and sometimes it jumped ahead an hour or three as if to make up for lost time. As to when its chime boomed out, that depended on when the clock hands happened to be pointing to the hour, which might happen eighteen times in an afternoon and then not for days together. Darius’s brother, Cyrus, grumbled that when the clock hadn’t worked at all, at least it had managed to show the right time twice a day. But Darius thought the clock was perfectly suited to Bell House, where hardly anything worked as it was supposed to and repairs were seldom made.
Whatever the time was, it wasn’t eighteen past eleven, that was for sure. It was late in the afternoon on a cloudy day in spring, and Darius had just come back from school.
Cover blurb
The bees on the Bell estate are dying. There’ll be no more delicious honey, and without the bees to pollinate flowers, no more fruit and vegetables. No more of Mrs Simpson’s glorious pies and cakes! Worse still, Mr Fisher the gardener will have to leave the estate, along with his family. Darius Bell is determined that something must be done, even if the dastardly Mayor is against him.
Then Darius has a great idea. But he will need help from his friends and family to make it work. And he must drive a hard bargain with Mrs Lightman, the school principal and a dragon if ever there was one…
A sequel to the award-winning Darius Bell and the Glitter Pool, this is a very funny story of problem-solving, teamwork and pollination.
