The Secret Life of Bees was the choice for my book club last month. I hear that it is going to be made into a movie!
The Secret Life of Bees
Author: Sue Monk Kidd
Synopsis:
Lily Owens is 14 years old and treated pretty badly by her father. Her mother died when she was only two years old and Lily still remembers some of the incident. The book is set in the 1960s in Georgia where they civil rights movement is starting to gain hold. After an incident in town with her nanny, a black woman named Rosaleen, Lily and Rosaleen head to Tiburon, South Carolina, a city that Lily believes her mother visited.
In Tiburon, Lily meets August and her sisters. They are bee keepers. Here Lily learns the truth about her mother and must come to grips the her fantasy about her was not like the reality.
What did I think?
I loved this book for many reasons, one of them being that we use to keep bees when I was younger and this story was filled with bee keeping references. The book was well written and made me think of times when I wished for a different reality. Lily doesn’t understand the conflict between blacks and whites, but she is not sure entirely how to handle it. She just wants to know what happened to her mother. The characters were well thought out and developed. The story has a bit of a mystery to it and will keep you reading until the very end.
