The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk KiddMy review
rating: 2 of 5 stars
I finally picked this book back up and reread it. (I as assigned to read it once for a class and never finished.) It's around 200 pages, and a very easy read. Only took me about 6 hours.
I thought the book was ok. It's set in the 1950's or so, against a back drop of the civil rights movement. It's about a white girl, Lily, whose mother died when she was 4. Her father isn't very nice to her, so she runs away with her nanny, a black woman who has recently gotten in trouble with the law while registering to vote, to a town she knew her mother had been to. The end up staying with 3 black sisters who keep bees. While staying there, Lily learns about her past, and about herself. This part of the book I liked. I think the emotional stages she goes through while finding herself are very realistic to what all of us go through at some point or another. So it's easy to relate to Lily in that way. I also liked the civil rights backdrop and thought it added a lot of interesting insight to the story and what it was like to be in the South at that time.
In the book, the black sisters have their own little church, in which they worship the Black Madonna (aka Mary, the mother of Jesus, as a black person). I've had a lot of people ask me if I think the book is sacrilegious because of this. My answer is no, I do not think that. Yes, the religion and its practices are very different from what I believe, but I don't think reading about this religion is any different than reading about any other religion that believes something different than what I do. I didn't think anything they portrayed was offensive or anything like that, just different. I did think that the author spent a lot of time on the religious part, which isn't a bad thing, but it was kind of boring for me. Which is why I only gave the book two stars. But all in all it was a good read. It has some foul language, and some potty language, but other than that pretty clean.
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1 comment:
I liked this book. The sisterhood is probably what got me. Women helping each other. The movie fits the book pretty good too, I liked it.
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