Meg doesn't have much to do with her father who she thinks is a wealthy business man. Upon his death she learns that he was a thief. Desperate for his approval, even from the grave, she decides to steal from one of Fifth Avenues wealthiest families. Ian, her fathers right hand man tries to persuade her not to engage in thievery. What ensues is a treacherous situation. Ian finds himself torn between greed and his newly found love for Meg. In the end Ian is punished for his part of the robbery. Their love story is implied.
A pretty good book. I didn't like the ending but I did like the characters. ( )

Good story. Not your typical novel for the era, one where the main player is a "bad girl" or at least a wanna-be. The hero is a bad boy too. Enjoyable read. ( )

This book reminds me of Joni Mitchell's song, "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got til it's gone?"

Raised in the luxury of a rural private school with the outcome of employment in that school, Meg's past, present and future is secure. Her father has seen to that. All her needs met luxuriously with the comforts of the age. But not the relational contact Meg longs for. Feeling disconnected from the only bit of family she has with her father, she chooses to be set adrift upon his death. Meg has every offer of continued future at the private school, yet she chooses to attempt proving herself worthy of her father's missing attention. And that gets her anything but what she's pursuing.

Reading this story through the eyes of a mom, led me to frequent amazement at her inaccurate assumptions. THough frustrated with her unwise decisions, Ms Lang definitely kept my interest to see where Meg would make her next false step and how she would live the consequences!

Lots of adventure and intrigue, unique personalities and historically interesting settings. Thank you, Maureen, I enjoyed your creativity with this story and was actually relieved at the outcome!




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Where I got the book: pre-ordered on Amazon. Maureen Lang is a friend IRL. And I STILL never 5-starred a review till this one. Read on.

I feel that with this book, Lang has started to stretch herself out of the safer waters of the inspirational romance genre, and I like the result. Let me explain.

Th inspirational aka Christian romances I've read (and I'm not a huge expert on this) tend to follow a bit of a formula. Miss and Mr Wonderful are both really, really good people from Christian homes but at least one of them has become estranged from God in the mildest terms. So I'm not talking they-turned-to-Wicca-and-became-a-high-priest(ess) kind of terms. We're talking about how they stopped going to church/praying/reading the Bible sort of terms. This sad fact is usually dropped into the narrative about page 10.

And one at least of them has a little flaw, often involving trust i.e. they will Never Trust Again Because They Were Hurt. The other half of the prospective duo has a much stronger faith, and takes the lead in guiding his or her consort toward the happy ending.

In other words, these people are good. Almost, but not quite, perfect. For me, this has always created an unreal sort of disconnect because, seriously? I need to be able to imagine myself in the heroine's shoes, and they never fit.

So to the plot of Bees in the Butterfly Garden. Meg has left her exclusive boarding school to attend her father's funeral, only to discover he was a successful thief and the reason he never came to visit her at school was because he wanted her kept strictly away from his lifestyle. Meg is, not surprisingly, pretty mad at her father for a) not telling her the truth b) being absent from her life, but this is also an aha! moment because she sees her own rebelliousness as having good, solid genetic grounds. Realizing that her pedigree is never going to get her the posh husband that she's been trained to expect, Meg decides to become a thief herself and prove her father wrong about not belonging in his life.

She ends up working with Ian, the man her father informally adopted as an apprentice thief and surrogate son, to rob the family of a schoolfriend, Claire. Meg is torn between proving herself a good thief, growing to like Claire and her family, coping with the criminal element, and dealing with the attentions of two very different suitors.

In a way, this is the usual formula flip-flopped. It's the secondary characters who provide the faith element, while the hero and heroine set about breaking the 8th commandment (and probably the ones about coveting and bearing false witness as well). Add to this an extremely light touch with the inspirational elements until you are thoroughly wrapped up in the story, and there's definitely more edge to this novel than the everyday inspirational romance.

And it all made for an absorbing story. I found myself not wanting to break off to go do, y'know, real life things, and that's a very good sign. Lang's writing is always polished and easy, with good editing and packaging adding to the experience, so there was nothing to shake me out of Meg's world. My criticism would be that I'd like more character development in place of setting, but I'm beginning to understand that setting is loved by romance readers and you can't throw out all the rules of the genre at once.

Of course I'm sure there are readers who like the safe approach. But I get excited when I see forward movement, hence the rating. ( )