The Secret Life of Bees

I really enjoyed this book quite a lot. Like Extremely Loud, it's the story of a childhood gone awry due to guilt and the death of a parent. The plucky inventiveness of the heroine Lily is of a much more aggressive type than that of little Oskar. Another way of looking at it is the contrast between the way an adolescent girl's way of dealing with life and a pre-adolescent boy. Lily, a young white girl in mid-60s South Carolina, escapes from her hateful father and rescues the only person who has ever loved her, her black nanny Rosaleen.

The book's great achievement is its refusal to idealize either Lily or Rosaleen. Lily may take a stand against racism--even a dramatic one--but race is a not an issue she has wholly sorted out in her own heart. As for Rosaleen, Lily often finds her frustrating, infuriating, even grotesque.

As for the place they end up, a bee farm to which Lily is led only by the mysterious image of a black Madonna, it is a mysterious and multi-leveled world of three troubled but loving sisters who have invented their own religion and live together all mixed up with beekeeping and bananas, a cello, a wailing wall, an old ship's figurehead, and the tragic sadness of the song "Oh Susannah." Lily, dragging Rosaleen with her, descends on them with no explanation but the most transparent tissue of lies, yet they accept her into their home and lives. It is both frustrating and fascinating to watch Lily being reborn through the insights and experiences she has there. The process is not without resistance from her worse nature, and the friction and trouble and difficulty of it all, the constant tension of racial difference, the imperfections of everyone and of the world, keep the book from being saccharine and sentimental. You don't always like Lily, or the other characters, but you certainly always find her believable!