click to buy

In Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, Lily Owen, spends half of her time fantasizing about her dead mother.  The other half, she spends hating her father, whom she calls T-Ray because he doesn’t seem like a Daddy to her.

T-Ray is a bitter peach farmer who punishes Lily by making her kneel on grits in the kitchen floor for hours at a time. They live together in isolation on a peach farm in South Carolina until one sweltering summer afternoon in 1964,  when Lily is fourteen, T-Ray tells her things about her mother that have no place in her fantasy.  Her tells her that her mother left them, and that the day Lily accidentally shot her mother, she was merely returning long enough to gather more of her things.

Lily knew that she had accidentally shot her mother.  She faintly remembered.  But she refused to believe that her mother was leaving her. As far as she was concerned, T-Ray was a liar who lied all the time just to hurt her—afterall, when she was a child, he told her that her rabbit had been killed, but the next morning when she woke up, why, there it was!

With her head swimming in T-Ray’s words, Lily impulsively catches a ride into town with her nanny Rosaleen.  Rosaleen manages to get herself thrown in jail while trying to register to vote, and so, she and Lily decide they would be better off if they just left town altogether.

This well-written novel is a poetic coming-of-age story about mothers—the need for mothers, the need to know our mothers and the need to be mothers.  Monk’s settings are deep and pillowy—so authentic they are easy to fall into with a sigh and a smile.  Her characters are mostly sweet–there is a lot of sweetness in this book.  One gets the feeling Monk-Kidd has a hard time letting go of her characters and allowing them be unlikable.  This made for a complex abusive father which was nice to see, but it also caused the other characters to seem one-dimensional.

The ending was satisfying if not a bit too neat. There is, however, no doubt that Kidd’s poetic prose will keep us reading her work.  It is irresistible!  The slow southern flow of language is evident in every line.

(Thanks to Noelle Brooks for corrections on this post).

Buy
The Secret Life of Bees