Telegraph

Honey is the balm

Rachel Simhon reviews The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
By Rachel Simhon
12:01AM GMT 24 Feb 2002

What is it about bees that so beguiles the human imagination? Charlotte Jones's new
play, Humble Boy, currently going down a storm in the West End, uses the insects as a
metaphor for a family gone awry when the queen does not do her job properly. In Sue
Monk Kidd's debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees, they symbolise industry, renewal and
healing.
It is the early 1960s, and 14-year-old Lily Owens lives with her father, T Ray, and their
black servant, Rosaleen, in South Carolina. So far, so To Kill a Mockingbird, you might
think. Not a bit of it.
T Ray is a sadistic bully - "Thomas Edison when it came to inventing punishments" - and as
far from Atticus Finch as it is possible to be. Lily has grown up believing that she
accidentally killed her mother, and to some extent accepts her life of hardship, until
Rosaleen is beaten up for trying to register her vote.
Lily springs Rosaleen from hospital and the two of them go on the run, led to Tiburon,
South Carolina, by a label from a jar of Black Madonna honey, which is one of Lily's few
mementos of her mother. They find refuge in the home of three eccentric sisters called
May, July and August, black women who keep bees and head the Daughters of Mary, an
extraordinary cult of the Virgin.
In the strange, poignant world of the sisters, where honey and beeswax are balm for life's
hurts ("nothing was safe from honey the ambrosia of the gods and the shampoo of the
goddesses") and bees restore order and harmony, Lily unravels the mystery of her
mother's death and finds hope: "The world will give you that once in a while, a brief timeout;
the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-
up life."
This a wonderful book, by turns funny, sad, full of incident and shot through with grown-up
magic reminiscent of Joanne Harris. But Lily, no angel, is prickly, difficult and sardonic: "In
a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me
with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional. I was the girl abandoned
by her mother What a special case I was." And a hard edge of reality - the tragic
consequences of racial segregation in the Deep South - gives bite to what might otherwise
have been just so much whimsy.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/fictionreviews/3573583/Honey-is-the-balm.html
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES

Sue Monk Kidd, Author.

Honey-sweet but never cloying, this debut by nonfiction author Kidd (The
Dance of the Dissident Daughter features a hive's worth of appealing
female characters, an offbeat plot and a lovely style. It's 1964, the year of
the Civil Rights Act, in Sylvan, S.C. Fourteen-year-old Lily is on the lam
with motherly servant Rosaleen, fleeing both Lily's abusive father T. Ray
and the police who battered Rosaleen for defending her new right to vote.
Lily is also fleeing memories, particularly her jumbled recollection of how,
as a frightened four-year-old, she accidentally shot and killed her mother
during a fight with T. Ray. Among her mother's possessions, Lily finds a
picture of a black Virgin Mary with "Tiburon, S.C." on the back—so,
blindly, she and Rosaleen head there. It turns out that the town is
headquarters of Black Madonna Honey, produced by three middle-aged
black sisters, August, June and May Boatwright. The "Calendar sisters"
take in the fugitives, putting Lily to work in the honey house, where for the
first time in years she's happy. But August, clearly the queen bee of the
Boatwrights, keeps asking Lily searching questions. Faced with so ideally
maternal a figure as August, most girls would babble uncontrollably. But
Lily is a budding writer, desperate to connect yet fiercely protective of her
secret interior life. Kidd's success at capturing the moody adolescent girl's
voice makes her ambivalence comprehensible and charming. And it's
deeply satisfying when August teaches Lily to "find the mother in
(herself)"—a soothing lesson that should charm female readers of all
ages.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-670-89460-4
KISS KISS SUMMARIES

1. THE LAND LADY

Genre: short story
Narration: third person omniscient
Time and place:  Bath, UK. After WWII.
Plot:  Billy Weaver, a seventeen-year-old boy, was sent to Bath by his head office to meet the
Branch manager. He heads toward The Bell and Dragon, which is a pub he’s been told he could spend
the night at. On the way, he notices a sign in the window of a nearby house: “BED AND BREAKFAST.”
Billy looks in the window and notices that it’s a charming house, with a roaring fire and a little dog curled
up asleep on the rug. On an impulse, he decides to give it a try and rings the doorbell. It is answered
almost immediately by an old lady who invites him to enter and tells him the room rate. Billy decides to
stay. She tells him that he is the only guest as she takes him to his room. When he goes downstairs to
sign the guest-book, he notices that there are only two names in the entire book. The names are over
two years old… and what’s more, they seem to be familiar. As he struggles to remember where he’s
heard the names before, the landlady brings him a cup of tea. They begin talking about the former
guests, and she notes that both of them were handsome young men just like him. Billy is confused and
tries to change the subject by commenting on a parrot in a cage, which he thought was alive but just
realized is stuffed. The landlady reveals that she herself stuffed the bird, and she stuffs all her own pets.
Billy realizes with a shock that the little dachshund by the fire isn’t alive either. He also notices a curious
bitter almond taste in his tea, and he asks the landlady again: “Haven’t there been any other guests here
except them in the last two or three years?” She gives him a little smile as she replies, “No, my dear.
Only you.”

2. GENESIS AND CATASTROPHE:

Genre: Short story 
Narration: Third person, omniscient
Time and place: Braunau, Austria-Hungary, 1889
Plot: A woman in labour is delivered of a baby boy. The doctor tries to reassure the mother, Klara,
that the child is healthy and will survive, but she has lost all hope after her other three children have
died. She and her husband have recently moved to a new city. Her husband is an overbearing,
unsatisfied sort of man. The doctor manages to convince her that her new son is all right and she
decides to name him Adolphus, or Adolf for short. She finally gets to hold her little Adolf and falls in love
with the beautiful child. Her husband, Alois Hitler, arrives and comments on the boy’s small size. The
doctor pleads with him to give his wife some needed support. He finally kisses her and tries to comfort
her while she cries and prays so his baby can live. 
 

3. WILLIAM AND MARY:

Genre: Short story
Narration: Third person, omniscient
Time and place: Oxford, after WWII
Plot: Mary Pearl’s husband William has passed away one week ago, and after the solicitor reads the
Will, he gives her a letter from her dead husband.At home, she reads the letter, written in formal
terms, which describes the surgical procedure of doctor Landy: removing the brain and one eye
to keep him alive. She visits Dr Landy and announces to the doctor that she wants to take her
husband home. He is astounded and tries to talk her out of her plan, but she is adamant. She wants to
take him home to take revenge and do the stuff he didn’t allow her to do (when he was alive)
while he watches and is unable to react. 

4. ROYAL JELLY:
Genre: Short Story
Narration: 3rd person omniscient
Time and Place: A countryside in Oxford
Plot: Mabel is frightened because her newborn daughter won’t eat and has been losing weight since
birth. She’s desperate and frantic, but the doctors can’t do anything. One night her husband, Albert,
who is a beekeeper, is reading about royal jelly, which is a substance fed to worker bees and the queen.
Albert gets the idea that this jelly could help his daughter grow too. He offers to feed the baby at night
and when Mabel comes downstairs the next morning, she is astounded to hear that the baby has drank
five ounces of milk throughout the night. She gets curious, though, when Albert later claims to have
cured the baby himself. He finally confesses that he added large quantities of royal jelly to the baby
formula, much to Mabel’s shock and dismay. He tries to convince her with facts and statistics, but she
will have none of it. She forbids him from feeding anymore of it to the child but starts to notice that the
baby is gaining weight extremely rapidly and is also developing fuzz. Later, she also realize her
husband has also developed physical attributes similar to bees.

5. MR BIXBY AND THE COLONELS COAT:

Genre: Short story.
Narration: 1st person, frame narration
Time and Place: U.S (NY / Baltimore), 1950.
Plot: The narrator starts off by describing women as gold diggers, providing us with an
example: a famous story in the U.S, about Mrs Bixby, a vigorous woman married to Cyril, a
dentist. The couple lives in New York, but once a month, Mrs Bixby would travel to Baltimore to
visit her lover, a Colonel. One day, she receives a goodbye gift from him: a black beautiful
expensive mink’s coat and, as an alibi, she takes it to the pawn broker's, telling Cyril she found
a pawn ticket later on. In the end, Cyril decides to use the ticket and gives the coat to his lover,
his secretary, lying to his wife and gifting her a cheap neckpiece instead.

6. EDWARD THE CONQUEROR:

Genre: short story
Narrator: 3rd person omniscient
Time and place: October 1953, England countryside.
Plot: Luisa and Edward lived in a large country house. She called him for lunch when he is
burning brambles and bonfire. On approaching, she sees a cat that follows them inside the
house.  Every afternoon, she made up a piano concert for herself and imagined that she was
playing in front of an audience. The cat reacted to one on the pieces she was playing. She
thinks the cat is the reincarnation of a famous musician, Lizst. The husband reacted negatively
when he was told. Luisa went to the library to do some research on reincarnation.  She
confirmed this because the cat had the same warts in the same place in the face. She decides
to call in famous people to meet the cat, so the husband throws the cat into the bonfire.

7. THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD:

Genre: short story
Narrator: 1st person participant (Gordon)
Time and place: Oxford, September (after WWII)
Plot: Claude and Gordon who worked at the filling station are preparing raisings which they
have soaked overnight in order to go hunting the following evening (poaching). Claude
describes three methods of techniques his father used for catching pheasants:
A.  Putting horsehair across the raising for it to get stuck and immobilize the bird.
B. Imitating fishing
C. Covering the eyes with a paper cone that contains raisins and glue on the hedges.
They used a fourth technique which was provided by Gordon, which implies filling the raisings
with sleeping pills. That evening of poaching they used Gordon’s technique and wait for the
pheasants to drop asleep to the ground and picked them up.
They collect the pheasants and put them in bags. They sure them to Bessie Organ, who would
take them to the filling station the following morning. Next morning the pheasants woke up and
flew away.

8. PIG: 
Genre: short story
Narrator: 3rd person omniscient. Parody of Voltaire’s Candide.
Time and place: Virginia farm and New York City, 1940’s - 50’s
Plot: Once upon a time a lovely baby boy was born in NY City. The baby becomes an orphan
when his parents are shot by mistake. An aunt takes the baby to her farm to raise him. They
were both strict vegetarians, the boy developed a great ability to cook when he was 17 years
old. His aunt passed away, she left him instructions to go to NYC to see her attorney to get his
inheritance. The boy was scammed by this man who left him only with a small part of the
money. Lexington is satisfied with the little money he was given and goes to a dirty restaurant to
have something to eat. The waiter brings him pork, he tried it and loved it, he wanted to know
where he could get such an extraordinary meat. He was fooled by the waiter and the cook of
such horrible restaurant and was sent to a packing house where there was a notice which said
“visitors are welcome at any time”. He entered there, saw how the pigs were killed hanging from
the anchor, and the next thing he knows was that we was going to be killed exactly the same
way.

9. THE WAY UP TO HEAVEN:

Genre: short story
Narration: 3rd person omniscient
Time and place: NYC, 1950
Plot: Mrs Foster had developed an obsession about being late and her husband enjoyed
delaying her to the point that her left eye started twitching.
 When her husband allowed her to go to Paris to visit her daughter and grandchildren,
he insisted him to go to the airport to see her off. The plane was delayed by fog so she returned
to her large house where her husband stayed overnight although the servants had already been
distinguished.
The following morning when the taxis came to pick her up, he tried to delay it with the
excuse he had forgotten a present for his daughter. She finds the present wedged into the seat
so she went to the door and she heard a strange and familiar noise (the lift that got stuck). After
six weeks in Paris, she returned to find the house with all the letters she had sent to her
husband and a strange swell. She calls the repairman to repair the lift.

10. GEORGY PORGY:

Genre: Short story
Narrator: 1st person participant
Time and place: Britain, after WWII.

Plot: Vicor George obsessed by physical contact with women is traumatized by his mother's
attitude and death. He feels harassed by women and confirms it with experiments using rats. He
is invited to a garden party where he is given alcohol and gets intoxicated. He kisses with a
woman and ends up inside of the woman mouth where he hears other woman voices. He takes
shelter from women inside and realised he was not alone but other men in white are with him.
They were hospital personnel.