The Secret Life of Bees in The Complete Idiots Guide to the Ultimate Reading List

Nov 18, 2011 Lisa (Harmonybites) rated it it was ok

Shelves: contemporary, literary-fiction, novels, fiction, chick-lit

This is fairly well-written in a line-by-line sense but never engaged me. I kept making comparisons in my mind to similar books and found it wanting, and as pages passed this felt more and more contrived and implausible, too many questions piled up.

This is the first person story of Lily Owen, a fourteen-year-old white girl in 1964 South Carolina, just as the landmark Civil Rights bill has passed. Lily's black housekeeper and "stand-in mother" Rosaleen goes into town to register to vote. When th This is fairly well-written in a line-by-line sense but never engaged me. I kept making comparisons in my mind to similar books and found it wanting, and as pages passed this felt more and more contrived and implausible, too many questions piled up.

This is the first person story of Lily Owen, a fourteen-year-old white girl in 1964 South Carolina, just as the landmark Civil Rights bill has passed. Lily's black housekeeper and "stand-in mother" Rosaleen goes into town to register to vote. When three racist thugs hurl racial epithets at her, she taunts them with that fact, tells them she just stole fans from the church, and spits chewed tobacco over their shoes--inciting them to assault her and causing her arrest. (If this behavior is typical, it amazes me Rosaleen survived to reach adulthood. If it isn't, Kidd sure didn't do anything to indicate that or explain why Rosaleen acted that way.) Lily breaks her out and she and Rosaleen flee to a nearby town and are taken in by three black sister beekeepers.

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. ...more

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