The Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd, 2001
Historical fiction Young adultContemporary fictionLiterary fiction
A motherless girl in 1964 South Carolina runs from her father and finds a household of beekeeping sisters who teach her what family might mean. A lyrical, warm voice carries grief and memory at a gentle pace, with moments of wonder that feel lived-in.
Feels like grief, hope and wonder. About family, memory and freedom.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy lyrical family stories told by a young narrator who notices the world closely. The 1964 South Carolina setting brings racial hostility and a child's grief into the story, so some passages are heavy.
Why read it
It gives you a warm, clear-eyed look at makeshift family and grief, with a narrator whose wonder makes the 1964 setting feel close.
A page from the book
When beauty enters the body before the mind can name it.
I didn’t know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only thing I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way. Sue Monk Kidd.Sue Monk Kidd was born in Albany, Georgia, in 1948 and grew up in Sylvester; before this novel she published spiritual memoirs, including When the Heart Waits.
Books that feel like this
More by Sue Monk Kidd
The Invention of Wings
Sue Monk Kidd, 2014
Two women in nineteenth-century Charleston—one born to privilege, one born enslaved—grow up entwined and learn what it costs to claim a self.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Secret Life of Bees for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy lyrical family stories told by a young narrator who notices the world closely. The 1964 South Carolina setting brings racial hostility and a child's grief into the story, so some passages are heavy.
- What is The Secret Life of Bees like?
- A lyrical, warm voice carries grief and memory at a gentle pace, with moments of wonder that feel lived-in. Feels like grief, hope and wonder. About family, memory and freedom.
- What should I read after The Secret Life of Bees?
- If you liked The Secret Life of Bees, try Night Road (Kristin Hannah), The Things We Cannot Say (Kelly Rimmer) and If I Stay (Gayle Forman).
A taste of the feed
Time doesn't heal so much as hand you something to wear over the wound.
Maybe time didn’t heal wounds exactly, but it gave you a kind of armor, or a new perspective. A way to remember with a smile instead of a sob.
Night Road · Kristin Hannah
What goes missing when a family stops asking questions?
What happens when stories like theirs are lost? What happens when there’s no one left to pass your experience on to, or you just can’t bring yourself to share it?
The Things We Cannot Say · Kelly Rimmer
How fast an ordinary morning can become a road full of metal.
The car is eviscerated. The impact of a four-ton pickup truck going sixty miles an hour plowing straight into the passenger side had the force of an atom bomb. It tore off the doors, sent the front-side passenger seat through the driver’s-side window. It flipped the chassis, bouncing it across the road and ripped the engine apart as if it were no stronger than a spiderweb. It tossed wheels and hubcaps deep into the forest. It ignited bits of the gas tank, so that now tiny flames lap at the wet road.
If I Stay · Gayle Forman
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