Hannibal native to discuss second novel, ‘The Hive,’ on Saturday

HANNIBAL, Mo. — Melissa Scholes Young will return to her hometown for a reading and conversation about her second novel, “The Hive,” at 5 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 3, at the Hannibal Art Council, 105 S. Main.

“The Hive” is set in rural Missouri. On 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.

Scholes Young is the author of the novels “The Hive” and “Flood,” and she is editor of “Grace in Darkness” and “Furious Gravity,” two anthologies by women writers. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Ms., Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Ploughshares, Literary Hub and Believer Magazine. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Foundation, the Center for Mark Twain Studies and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

Born and raised in Hannibal, Scholes Young is a professor in the literature department of American University where she coordinates undergraduate creative writing.

The event is free and open to the public.  Copies of “The Hive” will be available for purchase, and the author will be available to autograph copies. 

For more information on this and other Hannibal Arts Council programs, call 573-221-6545, stop by 105 S. Main or visit hannibalarts.com.