This is one of my favorite books ever. I love this book. I need to get a list together of my opinion best books. This would be on it. Sue is one of my must authors.

This book introduced me to Sue Monk Kidd's writing. I have all her books now, but Mermaid's Chair and don't need that one. I love her style, her writing and her last 2 books have been amazing. I read this in 2005 and it blew my mind wide opened.

I love the information given with beekeeping and I love how this life is used to help deal with emotional wounds. This book is about healing. As a healer, of course this book appeals to me. The story is rich and the characters are deep. I love the sister in this book. May, June and August are some great women and I love how they work together. It's also a nice flip that this people of color are the ones helping a caucasian person.

There is so much about religion in this book, about the healing power of spirituality. It was also my introduction into the Black Madonna. A few years before this, the Black Madonna had visited me a few times in dreams and so this book resonated with that experience. Every since this book, I have wanted to keep bees on my lilac farm.

The movie was well done and I enjoy that one too, but the experience of reading this is a bit of a healing session on its own.

I absolutely loved this book. Perfect in every way. Each character was well rounded with flaws and all. I will definitely read it again. The movie was a wonderful representation as well.

To me, the difference between is a good book and a great book is whether you have to suspend disbelief or whether you just believe. I became curious about “The Secret Life of Bees” when I saw the preview for the upcoming movie in the theater. It looked mildly interesting and overly sugary. You know, one of those feel good stories about people coming together despite racial differences. It’s been done a gazillion times and the stories are usually trite and maudlin. (I will say that the movie looks like it’s going to fit into the trite and maudlin mold.) Imagine my surprise when I found the novel to be so great. It’s absolutely beautiful. It exceeds every expectation. I had to force myself to put it down to do the things I needed to do. I didn’t need to suspend disbelief; I believed.

I think this is a book for every girl and woman to read. I’d much rather see teen girls reading this than most of the books I see on the young adult shelves. It’s one of those books that lifts you up and makes you believe in ideals. I didn’t think anyone was writing books like this anymore. Fortunately, I was wrong.

One more thing; having read the book, I have absolutely no desire to see the movie. I cannot imagine Dakota Fanning as Lily and all those famous actresses as Rosaleen and the Boatwright sisters. And, I cannot imagine the movie adding anything to the richness of the novel. Maybe I’ll be wrong, but I’ll never know.

One of my favorites. I didn't want to put it away and was sad when it was over.

Last week I started reading the book and it's simply magical! The way it's written tastes like peaches and honey. Reading it aloud is recommended.

Though The Secret Life of Bees has the potential to be a heartwarming little novel, it falls flat on many accounts. The characters often feel unoriginal, including a sassy black nanny; a smart, yet under-valued girl who dreams of being a writer; and a roughneck southern farmer. While cliches exist because of a bit of truth in them, I found nothing truthful in the majority of these characters, whose actions,including the two main inciting incidents of the novel, seem completed unmovitated and out of character.

The author's voice is ungainly and often uneven, with the narrator sounding at various times 9, 14, and 45 (turns out she's narrating from her 1-year old perspective). The timeline and pacing of the novel suffers similarly. I often felt I was led to believe that several months or at least weeks had passed when the narrator mentioned it had been 3 or 4 days.

While the small details of beekeeping and the black Madonna keep the book from being totally a flop, it would have benefitted from a better narrative point of view: having it being told in the moment or from a further distance than 3 months past. All in all, a middling work.

t Sue Monk Kidd is a Southern author born in Albany, Georgia in the late forties. Before she became wildly famous for her signature novel, The Secret Life of Bees, Kidd was known as a predominantly Christian author of contemplative texts regarding the nature of Christianity. Her books on the feminine divine and spiritual transformation garnered her popular acclaim among theologians. It is her first foray into fiction, however, that has made Kidd a household name. Whether this acclaim is deserved or not is solely a matter of opinion.

Many literary analyses of Sue Monk Kidd’s book The Secret Life of Bees have asserted that the novel breaks down stereotypes. This is not the case—the book actually reiterates stereotypes. Sue Monk Kidd is a middle-class white woman, so perhaps she can be forgiven for not comprehending or embracing the particular issues that a black woman of the 60’s might face. However, her black female characters are either the archetypal earth-mother as personified by August or the weak-willed, emotionally hysterical wilting violet depicted by May. It could be argued that Lily, as the main character, sees these women through her own mental filters. Thus, as a white teenager in the racially tense South of the sixties, she may have interwoven her own typecasting into her perception of these women. Conversely, though, as the reader we must be aware that Kidd is ultimately responsible for all of the voices in the novel—therefore any perceived stereotypes must be hers.

Kidd reinforces the trite, pigeon-holed stereotype of the black Mammy as a plot device in several ways. While the idea of the Black Madonna as a mother symbol is common to many cultures, Kidd’s culture is not among them. She does not have the ethnic wherewithal to give the black mother figure the nobility, sexuality, and ancient power with which history has imbued them. Thus Kidd’s book, touted as so brave and groundbreaking, comes off as hackneyed and predictable. Kidd breaks no new ground here—the tragedy of the motherless child is not original. The characters, meant to be the apex of strength and moral turpitude, come off merely as symbols without any of the depth and dimension that would have brought them to life. The exception to this pedestrian approach is the voice of Lily. Kidd gives Lily the right combination of adolescent petulance and naiveté so common to girls on the verge of womanhood.

The black “Mammy” stereotype has been perpetuated time and again in literature. The most famous example of this type of character resides in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. In The Secret Life of Bees, two of the main characters, Rosaleen and August, encompass this stereotype perfectly. The “Mammy” character is usually a large, matronly, dark-skinned woman. Her bulk and the frumpy attire serve to maternalize and desexualize her. For example, Kidd describes Rosaleen as having, “[a] big round face and a body that sloped out from her neck like a pup tent” with breasts “as big and soft as couch pillows”. We discover that Rosaleen was once married, and that August is supposedly too independent to have married. While one could argue that both Rosaleen and August portray feminist sensibilities, their strength is poorly delineated and rings false. They read more like a third-party, diluted version of Toni Morrison’s characters. Kidd’s treatment is reminiscent of trying to describe a sunset if you have only seen one on television.

The portrayal of these women’s strength feels particularly fabricated in the dialogue of the novel. These women do not speak as Southern black women in the 60s would have spoken. There is none of the poetic lilt to the vernacular at which authors like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker particularly excel. Indeed, most of the women in the novel sound like they walked out of Central Casting from the set of Steel Magnolias. It is possible that Kidd altered the dialogue to cater to her audience, which is predominantly white. To give her characters veracity and a true voice she should have emulated the African dialect of the day.

As a Southern woman, Kidd would have been profoundly aware of the enduring cultural legacy of slavery on the New South. She understood the importance of black caregivers to wealthy white families. However, this awareness does not translate into an understanding of African culture, nor does it transcend the innate racial issues that even modern black women must face. One must applaud Kidd for attempting to write in a voice so different from her own. One could even argue that by trying to write convincing black characters she is trying to attempt to transcend cultural stereotypes and social standards. However, Kidd does not have the literary gifts to give the reader a sense of verisimilitude and empathy with her characters. Her book unfortunately devalues the black women by resorting to slave-era stereotypes. As bildungsroman, Kidd’s novel serves very well. As an accurate barometer of the culture of black women in the South during the turbulent sixties, it falls flat.

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is an epic tale of a fourteen-year old white girl who understands how meaningless racism is while she runs away from her abusive father and deals with the loss of her mother.

The narration is magnificent. The similes and metaphors used throughout the prose are interesting, and make for a beautiful read. A flurry of emotions came over me at various points in the story, and this, in my opinion, is the greatest compliment a writer strives for.

This is the book I can read again-and-again, especially when I feel low in life. A truly magical story.

Verdict: Highly recommended.

Great story from start to finish. I was pulled into the story right away and didn't want to sleep, eat or do anything until I finished it. So much emotion and the writer shows all possibilities in human relationships. It's a beautiful story about love and loss and hope. Highly recommend!!!

My gran gave me it to read.
Nice read. Dragged at the end.

This was a harmless, heart warming book that did not change my life or enrich my thinking in any large way - except perhaps that I am slightly less afraid of bees. One thing that is a slight pet peeve with me is the healing power apparently inherent in the culture of the 'other'. Here is the formula: 1 caucasian person, hurt and broken by the world they live in, be it by family, work or environment + 1 minority culture (black or asian is fine) = that one caucasian person finding the true wonders in life and becoming a more secure and happy human being after being surrounded by drove of their black or yellow or red skinned friends, who show them beauty and love such as a white person has never known. Thank you minority culture! All black women are not royalty, "like hidden queens". But a little known fact is that all, ALL old asian men are kung fu masters.

To summarize, I might criticize this book but I did read it in a weekend and there is something to be said for the ability of an author to keep his/her readers engaged. It is a good beach book. So there.

I loved this book. I felt like I was sitting in the softest feather bed and wrapped in a blanket of love. Is it perfect, no, are there cliched characters & moments, yes.....but I don't care. Set in the 1960's early civil rights movement era in the deep South, I was completely swept up in this read about Lily and her awakening to real love and family, racism, and beekeeping!

"People who think dying is the worst thing don't know a thing about life."

Lily age 14, lost her mother in a terrible accident when she was 4 y/o and is raised by her distant & sometimes abusive father and a black nanny, Rosaleen. She called her father T. Ray "because "Daddy" never fit him." Although she loves Rosaleen, she is desperate to find a connection with her Mother. A confluence of events send she & Rosaleen on the run and she decides to seek out people who may know her mother but she only has a few clues and a name of a town, Tiburon, SC.

The two eventually end up in Tiburon & find a trio of African-American beekeeping/honey selling sisters who provide them refuge. Lily is reluctant to come right out and tell them her real reason for being there as she is a runaway & helped Rosaleen escape police custody. And so begins her relationship with the wise August, chilly June & tragic May.

Lily discovers family & love in the most unlikely of places and begins to realize her own internalized racism. I loved a moment when she wishes God had not inflicted skin pigment on the human race. Amen to that! Besides finding motherly love will she discover anything about her own mother & will it help relieve the torment she has felt regarding her? There is quite a bit of feminist thinking throughout, not surprising in a story with a lot of strong female characters. Of course, there is lots about beekeeping, too. If it doesn't make you want to start your own apiary, it sure makes you want to have at least a spoonful of homemade honey every day!