Monday, 9 June 2014

Section 4 Pages 225-300

After reading this final section of the book, I was mostly satisfied with the ending. There was no M. Night Shyamalan-style twist endings like if Lily was her own mother or something equally stupid. However, the arc with T. Ray and Lily did end with me wanting to find out more.

Throughout the novel, We learn that T. Ray is not an ideal father. He punishes Lily harshly for no good reason, he doesn't care for or or even about her, and he wages psychological warfare on Lily by telling her that her mother left her and that she killed her. At the end of the novel, we see T. Ray fly into a fit of rage, but this time confusing Lily for her mother, Deborah. I think this is to show how much more angry T. Ray is at Deborah instead of Lily.

This took me by surprise, since the T. Ray we all know and love would just snatch up Lily and Rosaleen and give them the beating of their lives, but it appears that T. Ray is very hurt from all this, and is not really angry at Lily, but more so at her mother for leaving her.

As for the book as a whole, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The characters were more than just 1-dimensional entities. For example, T. Ray is not just some evil dad who does nothing but harm. He is a very damaged man who just wants his wife back, but cannot get her back.

Thursday, 5 June 2014

Review Response - Nick

     I agree with Beth Kephart’s review for many reasons. First I agreed with the fact that he said the book had to do with artifacts of love, because there were many symbolic things that would resemble love of someone or something. The journal Zach gave Lily was symbolizing the love Zach had for Lily. I also agreed with Beth because she pointed out in many places that the book is trying to involve the power of women and how dominant they can be. Rosaleen is a very magnificent lady who practices her cursive writing so that one day she can vote. Beth says that Lily developed mostly in the story around the Boatwright sisters. This is very true but she had also developed with Rosaleen and by seeing major events pass by her like when Rosaleen went to Jail and got beat, or May had committed suicide.

     Beth Kephart review helped me understand parts of the book I missed or had forgotten from earlier on. I also agreed that the book is near perfect. Most of the book was great even the beginning was intriguing and I enjoyed it a lot. Some events seemed random but made sense near the end that I almost forgot. If the places that were bland made more sense like the beginning when Lily talked about her mom dyeing was very confusing but had made sense later on.


     Beth Kephart’s review was very well written and I agreed with the majority of it. It opened my eyes to things and is a good representative of how wonderful the book was to read.

Review Response - Review of Beth Kephart

I completely agree with the review written by Beth Kephart. In her review, she shares how this book is perfection, full of inspired language, and a deep plot. She also talks about how wonderful and lovable the characters are.

Although I find perfection is a bit of a strong word to describe this book, I definitely think it is close. The inspired language that Kephart talks about is truly well written. Sue Monk Kidd used very powerful descriptive lines, such as:
"But here, now, surrounded by stinging bees on all sides and the motherless place throbbing away, I knew that these bees were not a plague at all. It felt like the queen's attendants were out here in a frenzy of love, caressing me in a thousand places." (Page 151)
That paragraph truly described how the bees made Lily feel and brought us right in the swarm with her. As I read it, I felt as peaceful and loved as Lily did.

Kephart also brought up the well planned and executed plot. Throughout the book Lily was just taking a break from T. Ray and her horrible life, while trying to figure out a little bit of her mother. She just assumed that her mother had visited August once before, or had just been in that town. It was amazing how Kidd was able to have a deeper plot, with August and June knowing the truth of Lily's mother and letting Lily lie to them for months. It was incredible learning that August knew all along and was just giving Lily her needed space.

Finally, Kephart mentioned that the characters were so well developed. As I have already commented on this point in my journal entries, I will only talk briefly on them now. August cares so much about Lily and her sisters and the bees. She started off just seeming like a nice women who was taking care of a stranger, but ended up truly loving Lily, as she had once loved her mother. May had such a deep loving soul, that having her die was heartbreaking. She took on everyone's pain, which was very peculiar, but also showed her deep empathetic feelings. June was truly interesting as she ended up hating Lily only because of her mother. She was scared to love anyone and once she lost May, she finally opened up and loved Neil. Lastly, I will talk of Lily. She had gone through so much trauma at such a young age, but didn't let that stop her from being such a caring person. She didn't let all the bad events bring her down and was able to become a truly kind and wonderful person.

Beth Kephart shared some key elements that truly made this book amazing. I agree completely with her opinion that The Secret Life of Bees is fantastic and I would love to read another book by Sue Monk Kidd.

Sarah S
June 5

Tuesday, 3 June 2014

Section 3 Pages 150-225

This section of the book made me considerably angrier than the last two.
Within 10 pages of this section, I was already angry at Lily. She decides out of the blue to CALL T.RAY.

WHAT IN GOD'S GREEN EARTH WOULD YOU DO THAT FOR?

You JUST fit in with the Boatwright crowd, and then you pull this and just end up being more upset for finding out that SURPRISE! T.Ray doesn't know what your favourite colour is!!!!!!

Another major thing that angered me was the fact that May committed suicide. This all started when it was rumored that a white movie star was bringing his black girlfriend to a movie, which was a big no-no in South Carolina in 1964. Zach, a boy whom Lily befriends earlier on in the book, is put in jail. August, not wanting May to go hysterical, does not tell her emotional sister what happened. One way or another, May finds out what happened, and drowns herself in the river with a rock. May is dead.

This surprised me very much, since so far, this book didn't seem to be the one where a lot of people close to the protagonist die. There was no major bond between Lily and May, which usually ends up cursing the latter into dying midway through the book to die to somehow teach the protagonist a lesson.

It also surprised me that when I thought about it, Zach getting arrested might not have been the only reason May ended her life. It could have been the fact that August and June were hiding it from her, because they thought she couldn't handle the truth. since she'd always been so emotional in the past.

Overall, I am liking this book as of page 225. I think that next section Lily might finally come through and tell August the truth, since she's been hinting at it throughout this section.

Monday, 2 June 2014

Journal 4 - Nick

     When I read this section of the book I knew there was going to be a lot of conflicts to be tied up or even left alone to be resolved with the end. I thought the story would deal with more conflicts than just deal with one. I did not like the ending of the book very much because it felt slow to me. It took forever for her father to try and get her to come back; it took the whole duration of the book. I thought T. Ray would be a stronger father and fight harder for his daughter but I felt like the story focused on power of females and made Lily and the sisters win.

     When the book ended I thought it was still continuing because the tension and atmosphere was still thick so I thought it would end more peacefully than it did. I enjoyed the last section most because I found many things out that I needed to too be satisfied, such as the fact that she was the one who had killed her mother when she was a kid. I also figured out that her dad always loved her which was much unexpected knowing the way he treated her in the first quarter of the book.

     When the Boatwright sisters protected Lily from the wrath of her father they made the father leave and Lily stay with them. I liked this ending because it would make no sense for Lily to go back after a long time of figuring out where her mother came from.

     On page 286, August told Lily that a hive without a Queen the bees would die very fast and be confused unless they can retrieve another one. This conversation made me think that maybe Lily resembles the bees and she has no mother, “Queen”. This made me think that throughout the story the bees are a symbol of Life and how it can fail without guidance. Luckily August took her under her wing and helped her.




     

Review - http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/secret-life-of-bees-sue-monk-kidd/1100311171?ean=9780142001745

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