The Beekeeper’s Question: Love and Honey, War and Reckoning

Young lovers, old friends, a mountain valley and a North African battlefield: Two Montana families face loss, prejudice, violence and redemption in the uncertainty of 1940s America.

This is a dramatic family saga of generations daring to ask the questions that shape their destinies,a story of enduring love in an era of American life that still echoes in society today. It’s 1942 and War War II looms over the lives of the Cooper family—a son in the fight whose pregnant war bride arrives to their isolated Montana valley and a son married to a Blackfeet woman whose return tears open racial tension just when people must work together for the war effort.

Leo Cooper, Franklin’s and Jesse’s father, is a philosophizing beekeeper and local preacher, modeling a vision for what the community might become. His colleague, Jereldene “Doc” Jesperson, holds the valley together curing bodies and tending souls. And Josie Shines the Light, a Blackfeet grandmother, must rely on Leo and his son to safeguard her granddaughter in this troubled settler valley, Pigeon River.