Exceedingly Mundane

I finished a really great book this afternoon, called “The Secret Life of Bees” by Sue Monk Kidd. I had gotten this at the library last week and started it, and have had a hard time putting it down. It’s a different kind of book, very Southern and very much set in a certain time period, the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in the deep South. I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It has a certain voice and spirit to it that really appealed to me. I didn’t want to put it down, and that’s the sign of a really good book for me.

Rather than try to write my own synopsis, here’s one I “borrowed” from Amazon.com – “In Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart’s answer to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words “Tiburon, South Carolina” scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily’s beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think of–Tiburon, South Carolina–determined to find out more about her dead mother.”

For the record, that makes #38 so far this year, with a total of 13,406 pages read. Up next to read is another library book, “Vanishing Acts” by Jodi Picoult. I recently read my first book by Picoult, “Plain Truth” and I really enjoyed it. I hope this one is equally good 🙂