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Fiction. Literature. HTML:The multi-million bestselling novel about a young girl's journey towards healing and the transforming power of love, from the award-winning author of The Invention of Wings and The Book of Longings Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted Black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina�a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.… (more)
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A kind of local bias makes me convinced that the Tarheel state has its southern neighbor beat when it comes to the quantity and the quality of writers. But when I was asked about novels from south of the border, I had just finished a great story by Charleston native Sue Monk Kidd.
The Secret Life of Bees is the story of young Lily Owens, who has lived nearly the whole of her fourteen years obsessed with the fragmented memory of the death of her mother. Her father is an angry and unloving. Her life is constrained to working on his peach farm and being shunned at school. The only kindness she has known has been from Rosaleen, the black woman her father took from the orchards to take care of her.
It is 1964 and the Civil Rights act has been passed, and Rosaleen goes to town to register to vote. But things go wrong almost at once- the resentment of some of the townsfolk turns violent and Rosaleen ends up in jail. Lily suddenly realizes that they have to escape, or they may both be killed by their various demons. She and Rosaleen break away from a mob of angry men and head towards the town of Tiburon, which Lily found written on the back of a picture in her mother’s things.
They have to hitchhike. They have no food and almost no money. But by the grace of God, they are taken in by three unusual sisters- black beekeepers named August, June and May. Lily calls them the calendar sisters, and their Black Madonna honey is in demand all over the country.
Lily learns many things that summer as she helps August with her bees. She learns how to lie and when to admit the truth. She falls in love, and learns how to let the impossible go. She learns about the secret workings of bee colonies and human families. And of course, she learns much more about her self than she is comfortable knowing.
The Secret Life of Bees is Sue Monk Kidd’s first novel, although the author is well known for her spiritual memoir The Dance of the Dissent Daughter. Readers familiar with that book will see the dissident daughter honored in Lily and each of the calendar sisters. And Kidd’s unusual vision of feminine spiritualilty is beautifully brought forth in the black Virgin Mary, who is more than just a symbol for August, May and June to sell honey. Lily’s voice is fresh and funny, full of unconscious one-liners without being too eccentric or cute. August is as wise as a grandmother, and Rosaleen is as constant as Lily’s real mother is absent.
It all makes for special story, sweet enough to be in real danger of being turned into a Hallmark movie. It is a story about girls and their mothers, the real definition of family, and the indomitable nature of love that crosses all lines- religion, race, even the past and (possibly) the future. By the time the summer is over, Lily and the reader are both initiates into the secret life of bees and the workings of the human heart.
This is the first person story of Lily Owen, a
The initial incident is supposed to happen in a small town of 3,100 people and that's what caused me no end of questions. Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers had been assassinated the year before and Freedom Riders Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner just the month before. Rosaleen had said she was going to a black church to be registered--an event planned for that day. So, a black woman is arrested that day involving a racial incident. No one in the church, her friends, her family learns what happened and goes to help her? The police who arrested her don't pursue her after she escapes? A fourteen year old girl runs away with her. Okay, the novel paints her father as neglectful and uncaring. Still, no one does anything? No neighbors or extended family at all? Neither Rosaleen or Lily worry that with her already charged with assault that aiding and abetting a minor running from home won't bite her? The black sisters take them in even though they're unknown to them and the eldest senses Lily's story about why they're there is a flagrant lie? In 1964 South Carolina no one has objections to this white girl living with blacks? A black boy openly rides around in a car with a white girl and it doesn't cause any repercussions?
Then on top of all these implausibilities, wafted about like smoke, is all this mystical stuff about bees, feminist spirituality and the Black Madonna--all of it with a sentimentality more cloyingly sweet than honey. Truth is, there are plenty of coming of age stories with young first-person narrators set in the Jim Crow South dealing with racial relations such as To Kill a Mockingbird. This just isn't one of the stronger ones. And after reading plenty of books lately suffused with magical realism and feminist spirituality by authors such as Alice Hoffman and Joanne Harris... Well, what those authors have in common is prose that is itself magical. For me Kidd just doesn't make the cut. Mind you, I seem to be in the minority on this, and two of my favorite authors on Goodreads (Sharon Kay Penman and Jacqueline Carey) rated it highly. But no, this just didn't do it for me.
There were sections when Lily reflects on the mother she’s lost and the father she never really had that touched my heart. This young girl’s voice comes through so strong and clear that sometimes I forgot the loss she’d experienced. And then I would read something like this.
“That night I lay in bed and thought about dying and going to be with my other in paradise. I would meet her saying, “Mother, forgive. Please forgive,” and she would kiss my skin till it grew chapped and tell me I was not to blame. She would tell me this for the first ten thousand years.”
Anyone who has ever been either a parent or a child (!) couldn’t help but be touched by the pain and loneliness behind those words.
Lily is a girl full of pain, hungering for the slightest bit of affection, and fueled by anger. And yet, I didn’t get a sense that she wanted anyone to pity her – she just wanted the smallest chance at a normal life, the tiniest sign that someone valued her as a person, could recognize the hurt she felt.
“Did this mean that if I told May about T. Ray’s mounds of grits, his dozens of small cruelties, about my killing my mother – that hearing it, she would feel everything I did? I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone’s joy seemed to double it?”
This book was an interesting mix of racial tension, Southern life, 1960’s politics and the mysteries of female relationships. With so many intertwining issues, it was difficult for me to focus on the underlying message, but I did take an image from here, a message from there. And sometimes I just enjoyed the writing.
“The first week at August’s was a consolation, a pure relief. The world will give you that once in a while, a brief time-out; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.”
At other times, I found my cynicism rising – sometimes, (and I understand how ironic this will sound in a story of girl whose mother dies and whose father does not love her) sometimes the events unfolding struck me as “too good to be true”. Or more accurately, to coincidental to be believable.
In the end, though, this book has many lovely parts, many small windows into a world and time and life I will never know.
Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bess tells the story of Lily who lives with her father T. Ray after a tragedy takes her mother's life. Rosaleen, a black woman who worked for T. Ray in the peach orchards, has been brought to the house to take care of Lily, but Rosaleen and Lily get into some trouble when Rosaleen attempts to register to vote. They flee to Tiburon, SC in search of safety and some answers about Lily's mother. There they find three sisters, August, May, and June, who provide Lily and Rosaleen with much more than shelter. Lily learns the art of beekeeping from August and finds support when she needs it most. This is a story about the power of connections, even those connections that seem unlikely. Here's just one passage that let's us inside Lily's head:
"The whole time we worked, I marveled at how mixed up people got when it came to love. I myself, for instance. It seemed like I was now thinking of Zach forty minutes out of every hour, Zach, who was an impossibility. That's what I told myself five hundred times: impossibility. I can tell you this much: the word is a great big log thrown on the fires of love."
This book carries in its pages the experience of the mid-1960s in the south, but the themes are universal. I love the strength that comes from these relationships and the ways that Lily uses that strength to find her own way through life's challenges.
Jim Crow laws and physical violence against blacks became a personal reality for Lily in 1964. When Rosaleen was her family's housekeeper and as close
Lily defiantly and boldly, without a plan, freed Rosaleen from hospital/jail custody. With her storytelling abilities and the Black Madonna in her mind, Lily fled with Rosaleen toward Tiburon, South Carolina. Tiburon, only a name to Lily, was written on a piece of wood, with a black madonna picture on the reverse side. Lily had found the relic in her mother's few possessions and Lily believed it might fill in Lily's vague memory of her mother who had died tragically when Lily was four.
In Tiburon Lily found the 'Black Madonna'. Eventually Lily's fictions gave way to truths, most already known to the Calendar sisters, August (the Black Madonna), June and May. Though Lily may not have found the answer to her mother's death, in the haven August provided, Lily found acceptance, facts about her mother and her father, secrets of the bees, and her own truths.
A number of people had recommended 'The Secret Life of Bees' as I was working through some organizing frustrations. The timing was perfect, and the message reclaiming. I was reminded that I can't fix everything, and that, as Lily said about Zach, her jailed friend whose immediate future was uncertain:
"I'll write this all down for you...I'll put it in a story. "I don't know if that's what he wanted to ask me, but it's something everybody wants - for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters." pg.185
Seek the truth, share each other's pain, celebrate the joys, do all you can, and recognize when to step back. Answers come from unexpected sources. Turn off the radio and listen to the bees. Sue Monk Kidd's writing carried me along seamlessly and totally entranced. sh 6/2009
This is a story that brings the reader full circle in a family and has you , perhaps, looking at your faith with mew eyes.
Lily’s story takes place in the summer of 1964 amid the racial tensions spawned by the signing of the Civil Rights Act. On July 4, 1964, Rosaleen takes off for town to register to vote; she is accompanied by Lily. On the way, the two fall victim to a racial incident that lands both of them in jail. The situation turns dangerous, so Lily engineers an escape in order to protect Rosaleen from further violence and save herself from the inevitability of her father’s punishment.
Eventually, the two women end up in Tiburon, South Carolina, sheltered by an eccentric all-female family of black beekeepers. There both women find not only the love, support, community, and nurturing that they need, but also the answers to many questions about Lily’s mother.
There are an abundance of females in this book, and all make fascinating, fully imagined characters. The writing is solid, captivating, and, at times, lovingly lyrical—in fact, there is an almost fairy-tale quality in the telling. But be forewarned: there are disturbing subthemes of suicide and rape, so this book is not recommended for the very young.
The story is strong on female mythology and sweet in the remembering. It is best appreciated by a female audience; in fact, it is hard to imagine that many men would find this book interesting at all.
Secret Life of Bees is a feel-good book about a down-on-her-luck girl who is redeemed by a loving support group of nurturing, motherly women. The woman support each other and Lily in a wonderful, all-encompassing way, and we, the reader, come away from this novel made stronger and wiser for having known them.
Don’t read this book if you are looking for a story about life in the South during the Civil Rights era. Do read this book if you are looking for a true-to-life story about the power of women’s friendship to give meaning to life.