by Sue Monk Kidd
(bio and other books)
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 dog 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 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 Monk’s poetic prose will keep
us reading her work. It is irresistible! The slow
southern flow of language is evident in every line.
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The Secret Life of Bees |
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