Author: Sue Monk Kidd
Publisher: Audible
Rating: WARTY!
I am seriously going to have to quit reading certain categories of novel - novels which have titles like The Mermaid Chair and The invention of Wings. Anything which won a 'medal' is out. Medals are for heroes. I see nothing heroic and everything formulaic about the bulk of such pretentious novels. What else can we ditch? Well, anything which includes a female name in the title (with few exceptions), such as An Abundance of Katherines, and especially if the name does double duty, such as Looking for Alaska. Anything which includes 'dreams' or 'stars' in the title, such as The Fault in Our Stars. Anything which uses a bad or sad and weak metaphor, such as Paper Towns.
Oh, and one more which just came to mind: anything which uses a reference to botany or zoology as a comment on human behavior or the human condition, and then employs quotes from some book on the topic as chapter headers is right out. Which explains my attitude towards this novel. Fortunately, I got it on close-out, so I don’t feel robbed.
Since it was taking me forever to get to the print version I had of this, I actually pulled it from the library on audio disk so I could listen to it on my daily commute. I quite liked the reading voice at first, since it seemed to match the character, but I discovered after several disks that I probably wouldn't want to spend much time with this character if all I ever got out of her was this flat, rather monotonic slightly southern twang which wasn't so peachy after a while. Nevertheless, I managed to listen all the way through which was more than I can say for several other audio books I've had to endure!
One major problem with this novel is that it really doesn't know what it wants to be. On the one hand, it’s a rather unconvincing tale of a young teen's escape from an abusive father. On the other, it’s a white person once again coming to the rescue of black folks - because y'all know they sure cain't hep th'sel's. Talking of heroic, Martin Luther King was a hero, and he's rightly held in high esteem, but I think it’s really sad that he fomented an escape from a situation where one race appallingly abused another, while he never himself escaped another kind of slavery: that which goes hand-in-hand with organized religion.
But I digress. This novel is set in the summer of 1964, when Lily Melissa Owens, the fourteen-year-old, is a very effectively a white slave on her father's peach plantation. She has grown-up thinking she shot her mom (accidentally), and now all she has is a father, Terrance Ray Owens. For reason unexplained, she addresses him as T-Ray, and he punishes her by making her kneel on grits. The family has a house slave, Rosaleen, who is Lily's stand-in mom.
One day, while accompanying Rosaleen into town so the latter can register to vote, Lily observes Rosaleen perpetrate the idiotic act of 'repaying' verbal abuse from some local jerks by dribbling snuff juice over their shoes. She's arrested and tossed into jail along with Lily, who is shortly thereafter picked up by T-Ray. After T-Ray explains that Rosaleen is lucky to even be alive, Lily discovers that Rosaleen was beaten and is in hospital, so she engineers her escape, and they flee to Tiburon, a nearby town which holds an attraction to Lily because she believes her mother lived there.
By unbelievably miraculous once in a billion coincidence, Rosaleen and Lily end up at exactly the same house in which her mother did indeed stay for a while before her death. That's pretty much the entire story, but of course, the author puts the pedal to the medal and runs on long after this because clearly this is nowhere near enough angst, suffering, metaphor, and cuteness to make it medal material.
So we start with a young girl in a kind of slavery, and we end with her in a different kind of slavery, albeit less abusive. We start with her knowing precisely nothing about exactly what happened that fateful day when her mom was shot, and we end with her knowing precisely nothing about exactly what happened that fateful day when her mom was shot. We start with her living a sheltered life, and we end with her living a sheltered life. We start with her having a father and no mother, and we end with her having a father and no mother. Rosaleen starts out as a housekeeper, and she ends-up as a housekeeper. She starts out unregistered to vote, and she ends-up unregistered to vote.
Alrighty then.
Quite frankly I don’t see the point of this novel.
I would have liked it better had it not trivialized African American struggles by including two stories of a person of color being arrested for a legitimate offence, and trying to portray it as an abuse. There was no need to include the struggle for equal rights in a story which had nothing to do with that struggle, so I assume it was done merely show the story's medal, er mettle….
The story rambled far too much. It went on an on about trivial details which did nothing to paint a better picture or to move the story along. It was boring and predictable, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with bees (except in that Lily's middle name is from the Greek for 'bee'), beehives, honey, or secret lives. Frankly, Lily Melissa ought to have been named Mary Sue. This sad excuse for a novel was actually a waste of my time.
