Book Review: The Secret Life of Bees

Apparently this is a bit of a trend for me but I didn’t enjoy the very beginning of this book by Sue Monk Kidd. It’s about a girl of 14 who lives in South Carolina with her father after she accidentally shot her mother as a small child. The setting is interesting as it takes place when blacks got the right to vote and she ends up running away and becoming integrated into a black community so we see her feeling a lot of similar “not fitting in” feelings. That’s not the whole book though. The community is mostly a community of women and there are a lot of parallels between the community of bees (as one of them is a bee keeper), the community of women and the queen bees being the mother to all the other bees compared to Mary being the mother of the world. They have their own little religion where they…not so much worship but respect the “Lady of the Chains” which represents Mary to them. They aren’t so into the Christian part but they do say their Hail Marys. I do have to say, writing this reminds me how annoyed I get with Jerry Seinfeld’s “Bee Movie”. I haven’t seen it, but in the ad, all the bees are male. In reality, bees are all female except the few that the queen produces for mating purposes. I mean, I realize that the intent of the movie isn’t to teach a nature lesson but shouldn’t you at least have the basic facts straight?