The Secret Life of Bees

I've found that I tend to be drawn to books that have a serious conflict or issue in them. I tend to like realistic over fantasy. Even though I love a good Harry Potter book, I like the refreshing feel of hearing a close to real life situation that makes you think about your life in a new light. I feel like this happens more when you are reading a realistic fiction book or a memoir. Of these kinds of books I prefer the ones with really dramatic issues, I love Jodi Picoult and her subjects tend to be really sad topics like school shootings, suicides, losing a parent, being abused, or some other really depressing thing that somehow makes an amazing book.

In "The Secret Life of Bees" the main character is a girl named Lily Owens who had a rough childhood, believes that as a child she shot her own mother, and her father is a cruel man who is makes her kneel on grits when she is bad. Where I've gotten in the story, She is living at the house of three sisters who have a bee farm. It sounds odd but the truth is that she had just run away from home with her black maid/housekeeper/cook who is named Rosaleen, who had been having trouble with the racists in their town. The story is set after the Civil war when African Americans are legally free but are still treated like dirt by a lot of people. Lily is not racist and loves Rosaleen because she is almost a mother figure and tries her best to protect Lily from the abusive father T Ray. They came to stay with the sisters because Lily thinks that they knew her mother. Part of the ongoing theme in this book is Lily's guilt toward killing her own mother. She was really young and found a gun on the floor while her parents were fighting, It went off accidentally and her mother was hit.

It's such a terrible depressing idea, a little girl who is going to have to live with the fact that she killed the one person who she loved more than anything. To put it in the authors words "She was all I wanted. And I took her away. " It's really sad but you don't really know what to think of the mother because you've got the bits and pieces of memory from a four year old and possible lies from a drunk. As a reader you don't really know what really happened, all you know is what Lily thinks happened.

I guess one of the reasons I like books like this is the way they make you feel about yourself and your own life. Reading this made me think about what my life would be like if I didn't have my Mother and how different I would be if I had grown up without a mother. This is a historical fiction book so you can also think of what a life would be like in that time period and what you would think of differently especially being a girl. I don't know about everybody else but that's one of the things that I love about reading. It really opens up your imagination and allows you to think of all those what ifs.