The Secret Life of Bees

by Sue Monk Kidd. Fiction. First published in 2002 by the Penguin Group. ISBN 0-670-89460-5. 302 pages.

Fourteen-year-old Lily Owens knows from experience what happens when the Queen Bee dies. Things get chaotic.

It’s bad enough that Lily’s mother was killed when she was four; she’s also been told she was responsible. Now her father suggests her mother was about to desert her just before she died. At the same time, Rosaleen, the family’s black housekeeper and Lily’s substitute mother, is jailed and beaten for defying white racists. Both Lily and Rosaleen escape, taking refuge in a town identified on the back of a mounted picture of a Black Madonna left behind by Lily’s mother. Longing for evidence her mother loved her, afraid to tell her story, she discovers acceptance, love – and forgiveness – among three unconventional black sisters who live outside town on their honey farm.

It’s one of those books that describe the people and place so well you feel like you’re there in the middle of it all. Even if you’re not a young teenage girl in South Carolina in the mid-sixties, you identify with Lily’s anxieties and her sense of injustice toward those she loves.

You also feel like it would make a good movie. And sure enough, it’s coming out in October. Be sure to read the book first; you’ll want to meet the characters firsthand.