Claire Conger

The Secret Life of Bees” (2002), spiritual writer Sue Monk Kidd’s first novel, tells the story of a fourteen-year-old girl escaping from her father and discovering what happened to her mother. It’s a page-turner, populated with wise women and stupid men, and told in the voice of the girl. This voice, well crafted by Ms. Kidd, carries the story, and, unlike her second novel, The Mermaid Chair, Ms Kidd keeps this story moving. (I couldn’t read The Mermaid Chair, and my posting Stephen King’s Backstory Well Done in Carrie explains why.)

This story appeals to me because it’s a coming-of-age tale, and as such, I will forgive many a shortcoming. Unfortunately, inconsistencies are central. The first comes early on: If Rosaleen, the family maid and our girl Lily’s nanny, is so dumb, why does she keep making such smart remarks? A second: Would Lily’s mother, the wife of a peach farmer, in the early 1950s, leave behind little but her pocket mirror and a hairbrush? She likely had only one of each and if she were traveling, those items would have been in her purse. Worse: Would Lily’s dad, who found her by the number on his phone bill from which she placed to him a collect call, have been unable to find her mother, in spite of the mother’s letters and phone calls to the house where Lily hid? Could he have been so arrogant, that in spite of his controlling nature, he never noticed these letters or took note of whom his wife telephoned? The reader is left to assume that he is so prejudiced he cannot fathom his white wife staying with black people.

More trivially, would a rural Southern home, owned and run by black women, in 1964, have a toaster oven? I did a bit of research to find out if toaster ovens even existed then, and yes, GE made one in the 60s, not like we have today, but more like an open toaster. I’d place my bet that those women would have been using a rack in the oven to toast their bread.

Additionally, I was happily reading along, enveloped in the voice of a girl who was the pet of her English teacher and “score[d] the highest number a human can get on their verbal aptitude test” (page 15 hardcover edition), when right in the middle of a life-lesson passage, are a skipped adverb and a badly chosen verb tense: “I heard the bitter tone in my voice, and it came to me how I could lock that tone into my voice forever. From now on, every time I thought of my mother, I could, so easy [easily], slip off into a cold place where meanness took [would take] over.” (page 264) Lily doesn’t make grammatical errors, so this stands out. I blame Ms. Kidd’s copy editor. (Anyone who considers the “their” ill chosen in the first quote, see Pesky Prepositions and Anonymous Grammar Nazis.)

With all this wrong, I still enjoyed the novel. After all, “There is nothing perfect . . . there is only life” (page 256 hardcover edition).