From The Critics
I found myself reading Sue Monk Kidd's breathtaking first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, during a season of extraordinary sadness, a time of boundless ache, deep anxiety and creeping distrust. The headlines were all about terror and war.
The big book of the moment was The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen's relentless tale of dysfunction, anomie and self-perpetuating dissatisfaction. What could a book about bees possibly yield in a time like this, I wondered as I studied the jacket. It was early morning, dark, when I cracked the spine. It was a far brighter day by the time I had finished.
"At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin.... The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam." This is how the book begins, and this is how the author transports us into the story. We know at once that we are in the company of a narrator we can trust. We sense that this is a tale of many layers and deep resonance.
Like Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Kent Haruf's Plainsong, this book is about family and caretaking and blurring social lines, about eccentric kindness, swollen hearts and the artifacts of love. It is about the South in 1964, about a child named Lily whose world is irrevocably transformed when her mother dies one tragic afternoon. It is not just the mother's absence that haunts Lily as she grows up; it is the fuzzy memory of the circumstances of her mother's death that makes Lily secretly wonder if she isforgivable, lovable, good. Goodness—what it is, what it looks like, who bestows it—is the frame within which this book is masterfully hung, the organizing principle behind this intimate, unpretentious and unsentimental work.
Lily is fourteen when the story opens, her mother ten years gone. Her life is a hard, small one. She lives with her father, a punishing man, and with Rosaleen, Lily's black "stand-in mother," who had worked on the family's peach farm until she was brought inside to take on the newly motherless girl. Rosaleen is a magnificent creation—full of spunk and odd wisdoms. With her lips packed full of snuff, she is embarrassingly—and powerfully—unself-conscious. Rosaleen has been practicing her cursive writing so that she can register to vote, and she has picked herself a candidate to back. She's more than ready for her coming civil rights, and she sets off one day, defiant.
Things go awry, of course, and Rosaleen ends up bruised and beaten, in jail; Lily decides that it's up to her to save Rosaleen, which, in a comic scramble, she does. As fugitives from justice, the two put their fate in the hands of a relic from Lily's deceased mother—a small wooden picture of a black Virgin Mary.
It's the handwritten words on the back of the picture of Mary—"Tiburon, South Carolina"—that compel three black sisters to take Rosaleen and Lily in, for reasons they keep to themselves, at least for awhile. The sisters are beekeepers, with a flourishing business in honey and candle wax. They are keepers, too, of an old black Madonna carving, which presides over their house. It isn't long before Lily and Rosaleen are inducted into their world: "We lived for honey," Lily says. "We swallowed a spoonful in the morning to wake us up and one at night to put us to sleep. We took it with every meal to calm the mind, give us stamina, and prevent fatal disease. We swabbed ourselves in it to disinfect cuts or heal chapped lips. It went in our baths, our skin cream, our raspberry tea and biscuits. Nothing was safe from honey.... honey was the ambrosia of the gods and the shampoo of the goddesses."
In the company of the beekeepers and their extraordinary female friends, Lily slowly learns to live with her own past, to trust the beekeepers with her secrets and to navigate the pressing prejudices of the South. She learns what goodness is and how it finally survives. She earns the respect of the company she keeps and becomes a better version of herself.
Maybe it is true that there are no perfect books, but I closed this one believing that I had found perfection. The language is never anything short of crystalline and inspired. The plotting is subtle and careful and exquisitely executed, enabling Kidd not just to make her points about race and religion, but to tell a memorable story while she does. The characters are lovable and deep-hearted, fully dimensional, never pat. The story endures long after the book is slipped back onto the shelf.
—Beth Kephart
