Not a book I would have picked up independently but one my mother gave TS1 when we were visiting last month and Vivian read it so uncharacteristically quickly, essentially consuming it during our crosscountry flight, that I figured a read was indicated. And so it was, as I enjoyed The Secret Life of Bees despite the complete lack of anything resembling science, science fiction, or thriller material.
TSLoB is the story of the summer of 1964 of Lily, a 14 year old girl down South. Author Sue Monk Kidd herself grew up in a small southern town during that period and uses the racial tension (this is just after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law) as a major source of dramatic conflict. But the bigger conflict, if mostly unstated, is the relationship between the girl and her single parent father as even after 10 years have gone by the two cannot get past the accidental death of the mother/wife.
Actually, the story itself held little interest for me as I simply could not connect with the characters, something I find necessary, but Kidd did an excellent job in bringing an interesting set of characters to life with vivid, sharp imagery and dialog that truly sounds real and not just exposition between quotation marks. Lovely writing, in other words, that kept my attention even though the plot did not.
That I finished this novel on the same day I finally watched Ghost World is an interesting if unintentional coincidence. The two protagonists have little commonality–GW’s Enid could hardly be more different than Lily–and they face very different problems (although both are missing mothers) in very different situations. Yet both fictions have a similar appeal in their exceptional use of dialog and imagery to convey the creators’ thoughts.
recommended
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