The Secret Life of Bees
By Sue Monk Kidd
(Viking Adult, Hardcover, 9780670894604, 320pp.)
Publication Date: January 2002
Other Editions of This Title: eBook, Compact Disc (May 2009), Paperback (September 2008), Compact Disc (January 2006), Paperback (October 2005), Paperback (January 2003), (January 2003), Hardcover (October 2002), Audio Cassette (September 2002), (January 2002), Compact Disc (January 2002)
Categories: General
 |     |
"The bees came the summer of 1964, the summer I turned fourteen and my life went spinning off into a whole new orbit, and I mean whole new orbit. Looking back on it now, I want to say the bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, setting events in motion I could never have guessed." So begins the story of Lily Melissa Owens, a plucky girl, rich in humor despite heart wrenching circumstances. Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her harsh, unyielding father, her entire life has been shaped around one devastating, though blurred, memory- the afternoon her mother was killed. Four at the time, she remembers innocently picking up the gun. And, she has her father's eyewitness account of the gun firing. People remind her it was an accident, yet she's inhabited by a torturous guilt. Lily's only real companion is Rosaleen, a tender, but fierce-hearted black woman who cooks, cleans and acts as her "stand-in mother."
South Carolina in 1964 is a place and time of seething racial divides. When violence explodes one summer afternoon, and Rosaleen is arrested and beaten, Lily is desperate, not only to save Rosaleen, but to flee a life she can no longer endure. Calling upon her colorful wits and uncommon daring, she breaks Rosaleen out of jail and the two of them take off, runaway-fugitives conjoined in an escape that quickly turns into Lily's quest for the truth about her mother's life.
Following a trail left ten years earlier, Lily and Rosaleen end up in the home of three bee-keeping sisters. No ordinary women, the sisters revere a Black Madonna and tend a unique brand of female spirituality that reaches back to the time of slavery. As Lily's life becomes deeply entwined with theirs, she is irrevocably altered. In a mesmerizing world of bees and honey, amid the strength and power of wise women, Lily journeys through painful secrets and shattering betrayals, finding her way to the single thing her heart longs for most.
Learn more about Sue Monk Kidd at SueMonkKidd.com.
Sue Monk Kidd is the author of two widely acclaimed non-fiction books, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and When the Heart Waits. She has won a Poets and Writers Award for the story that began this novel as well as a Katherine Anne Porter Award, and a Bread Loaf Scholarship. Her fiction has appeared in several literary journals, and two of her short stories, including an excerpt from The Secret Life of Bees, were selected as notable stories in Best American Short Stories. The Secret Life of Bees is her first novel.
 |
The Tyranny of E-mail John Freeman Scribner |
 |
Ordinary Thunderstorms William Boyd HarperCollins |
 |
The Girl with Glass Feet Ali Shaw Henry Holt and Co. |
 |
The Book of Fires Jane Borodale Viking |
