The Secret Life of Bees is a
Southern coming-of-age small-town novel set in the era of emerging Civil Rights
in segregated South Carolina.  Lily Owens is fourteen years old and is haunted
by the guilt of having accidentally shot her mother when she was four years
old.  Her father is constantly angry and occasionally violent so Lily keeps her
distance from him.  Lily is brought up by a black woman, Rosaleen, and the two
of them are close.  When Rosaleen gets into trouble by answering back to some
white men who are rude to her when she goes to register to vote, the men beat
her up.  Soon Lily rescues Rosaleen from hospital to stop her from getting
arrested, and the two of them run away. 

Lily and Rosaleen end up staying
with a black family consisting of three sisters who make their living by
keeping bees and selling honey.  Lily learns how to keep bees and the gradually
becomes accepted as part of the household.  She develops a crush on a local
boy, even though he is black and they cannot follow through on their mutual
attraction.  Lily’s experience with the three strong sisters changes her view
of life as they cope with a racist world and the trials of life and death.  Bee-keeping provides her with routine that helps her cope with life and there are
parallels between bee society and the community in which they live that teach
her valuable lessons.

This novel by Sue Monk Kidd is
quite mannered in its narration by Lily herself.  Lily is quite a character
herself, isolated and unpopular, struggling to find her place in the world. 
She has a good nature and is smart, but she has trouble trying to understand
the world around her.  The book is full of details of space missions, a young
Martin Luther King, fallout shelters, Southern cooking and of course the lives
of bees.  Lily has a poetic tone of phrase, and she seems much older than a
girl just past puberty.  The audiobook is read by Jenna Lamia, who does a good
job in making Lily a plausible character, sounding young but prematurely wise. 
It is a testament to the strength of the performance that I kept on listening
to this audiobook to its end, when it is far from the sort of book that I would
normally read.  The plot has enough interest to keep readers wanting to know
what happens next and whether Lily ever makes any startling discoveries about
her dead mother. 

As someone without much knowledge
of American Southern literature, I’m not in much of a position to judge the originality
of Kidd’s work or its relation to work by other authors in the same genre.  It
does convey a strong sense of the time and place, and there’s definitely value
in seeing the struggles of African-American women as they create a life for
themselves.  The book ultimately struck me as a little self-indulgent in Lily’s
quirky yet innocent view of the world, trying too hard to get the reader to
smile knowingly.  Nevertheless, Kidd has a distinctive voice as an author, and The
Secret Life of Bees is a tale well told.

Link: Publisher’s web site.