The Secret Life of Bees

It is always said that a good book stays in your heart long after you’ve turned the pages, and ones like these come in very rare. I was very fortunate enough though, to stumble upon ‘The Secret Life of Bees’ by Sue Monk Kidd ‘one fine day’, even if it could be called a typical day. The Secret Life of Bees is a heart-touching book about racism, inequality, imperfection, female power and above all, the need for love for all living things, even a bee.

It’s the summer of 1964, the time when 14-year-old Lily Owens’s life is about to spin into a whole orbit. Lily’s life is shaped around the fuzzy memory of the afternoon her mother was killed, presumably by Lily herself. Everything changes when her black stand-in-mother, Rosaleen, pours snuff juice on the three deepest racial discriminators in Sylvan and Rosaleen is jailed. Hesitant at first, then desperate to free Rosaleen and herself from the clutches of a brutal and unfeeling father who makes her kneel on grits, Lily takes off, breaking Rosaleen out of jail, to Tiburon, S.C., the destination on the back of a picture of black Mary’s belonging to her mother. Fate leads her to an electric pink house with an equally eccentric trio of the black beekeeping sisters: August, May and June Boatwright. She is introduced to the breathtaking world of beekeeping, honey and Our Lady of Chains. She falls for the hum of bees, the gold of honey, the feel of the beekeeping veil, and most of all, the care she receives, especially having been starving for it her whole life. But will the honey last? Will she have to kneel on grits again? Will racism ever end?

The first thing that attracted me towards the book was its title. It was very funny - who would write a whole fictional book about the secret life of bees? Wouldn’t it be boring? Sue Monk can. Secondly, the description Sue gives of the bees’ and Lily’s lives are astonishing – the metaphors she uses, especially. She captures the perception of an adolescent wonderfully, the way Lily can be both mature and immature. She words the pain, pathos and self-doubt Lily has with excellent clarity too. My most favourite element of the book was the folklore that was used and how metaphorical it was to life, not to mention the quotes, my favourite being, “The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters,” by August Boatwright. The book talks about divine female spirituality and their dignity and how we must find Our Lady of Chains in ourselves and not only in her statue.

On the contrary, there might’ve been downsides to the book. Firstly, the book dragged during Lily’s stay in the Boatwright sisters’ house and I found the main conflicts not very substantial. Sue Monk could’ve clearly distinguished the rising action and climax too. I also thought the ending was quite abrupt and formulaic. Throughout the book, it doesn’t take a wizard to find what happens next and the deposition is quite conventional.