The Secret Life of Bees | Sue Monk Kidd

The Secret Life of Bees | Sue Monk Kidd | The Bees Knees

books:

The Secret Life of...

	The Secret Life of Bees Sue Monk Kidd Penguin (Non-Classics), 2003 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 1406 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

The Secret Life of Bees

This book was thought provoking, funny, truthful and very touching. I needed to read it slowly so I wouldn't miss any of the details. A great book for a vaction, even if the vacation is in the comfort of your own home. Enjoy!

The Bees Knees

Best read,artfully written.I was literally pulled from page to page. Cannot wait to see the film version, hope it follows the riviting story faithfully.

The Secret Life of Bees and the Secret of Life

Lily Owens doesn't have much incentive to hang around home. Her father beats her, her mother is dead, and her nanny is jailed and beaten by racists as she registers to vote. Surrounded daily by bees swarming in her honey-filled bedroom wall, she captures some of them to prove to her neglectful father that there is a problem in her room. One day she opens the jar to let the bees fly free, and she feels a voice inside saying, "Lily, your jar is open." Thus begins her adventure. Rescuing Rosaleen, her nanny, from jail, they run away. Following clues from items left behind by her mother, Lily ends up in a little pink house in Tiburton, South Carolina, where she finds out who her mother was, what life is all about, and where true strength and courage lie. She finds friendship, love, support, and some women who are more her mother than her mother had ever been. The recurrent theme of bees and honey lead Lily to appreciate nature and the beauty of simplicity and reality. The characters in this book are flamboyant and unrealistic in many ways but also very endearing. As the book finishes, it is difficult to leave the little pink house.

for more information click here

Wonderful Book...

What a fantastic novel! I am so in love with the story and with the characters that I cannot wait to see the movie on 10.17.08. Sue Monk Kidd is an amazing writer and story teller. When you are reading you will actually feel like you are in the story. I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5 because I wasn't exactly thrilled about the ending, but other than that I LOVED it.

Lovely and Sad Story

I know I am very late to the party when it comes to "The Secret Life of Bees". It was at a second hand store, and was the best of what was available, so I picked it up. The words and images in this novel set in 1964 South Carolina in 1964 were very evocative...when Kidd describes the oppressive heat - I can practically taste that hot, dusty air.

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.

for more information click here