The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. 

4/5 rating. 302 pages.

Book #6 of 2024. Finished January 31, 2024.

This is the beautiful tale of a girl named Lily, and her former housekeeper, Rosaleen.

Lily has had a hard life, she has been treated terribly by her father for as long as she can remember, and has had to deal with a terrible accident that killed her mom when she was young. One day, shortly after President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act, Rosaleen decides that she is going to go register to vote. Lily tags along and therefore gets dragged into a terrible act of racism, a jail-break, and the two being on the run.

One of the few things that Lily still has from her mother is a picture of Black Mary that says “Tiburon, SC”. Since this isn’t too far from them, they decide to head there with no other place to go. In Tiburon, they find three incredibly kind black sisters who run a honey business. Here, Lily is forced to deal with her past and learn how to start a new future.

I thought this was a fun, and incredible book. It manages to touch on the heavy topics of racism, trauma, pain, and yet still find hope and optimism. I would really recommend this book.

Some of my favorite quotes:

“People who think dying is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life.”

“She’d stopped going to the House of Prayer Full Gospel Holiness Church years ago because it started at ten in the morning and didn’t end till three in the afternoon, which is enough religion to kill a full-grown person, she’d said.”

“Day one of my new life, I said to myself.”

“The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn’t.”

“Placing my hands on the stones, all I wanted was not to ache so much. I wanted to let go of my feelings for a little while, to pull in my moat bridge.”

“‘You’ve got to hear of these things before you can imagine them.’ ‘Bullshit. You gotta imagine what’s never been.’”

“You see, everybody needs a God who looks like them, Lily.”

“You know, some things don’t matter that much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person’s heart – now, that matters.”

“The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”

“Will wonders never cease.”

“Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?”

“I don’t know if that’s what he wanted to ask me, but it’s something everybody wants – for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.”

“It’s my time to die, and it’s your time to live. Don’t mess it up.“

“‘We can’t think of changing our skin,’ he said. ‘Change the world – that’s how we gotta think.’”

“I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.”

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