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“Ali’s Bees,” an award-winning 2017 book and play by Dr. Bruce Olav Solheim, was presented last Thursday as part of an author’s night in the South Pasadena Public Library Community Room.
A group of actors performed scenes from “Ali’s Bees,” a book that was brought to life on stage.
Author/playwright Bruce Solheim was at the event, talking about the book and praised the work of Gabby Untermayerova.
In the book, Ali, a young Iraqi boy, loses his parents in the Iraq War and comes to live with his beekeeper grandfather in America. Ali must learn to make new friends, deal with conflict and bullying, heal from wartime trauma, and learn to pay the strange game of baseball. More importantly, Ali inherits a love of honeybees from his grandfather and works to help save them. “Ali’s Bees” (the play and the book) deals with the essential themes of tolerance, forgiveness, conflict resolution, and the far-reaching benefits of cooperation.
The book has won a silver medal from the 2017 Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards competition.
Solheim is a U.S. Army veteran and a distinguished professor of history at Citrus College in Glendora.
