The Secret Life of Bees- Skylar Kubas

Did your summer reading book grab your attention, and make you want to keep reading? I read,  The Secret Life of Bees, over the summer and I did not find the book very interesting. One thing I didn't like was that there was not a very clear plot and sometimes it was hard for me to tell where the characters were at times. Another thing was that there wasn't a very clear overall theme, there was only minor things along the story. One last thing I didn't really like about this book, was that it's sometime was written confusingly, and it was hard to understand.

Over the summer I read the book called, The Secret Life of Bees by, Sue Monk Kidd. I did not like this book very much. One thing I didn’t like was that there was not a very clear plot and sometimes you didn’t really know where the book was taking place. For example, when Lily, a young girl from Sylvan, South Carolina and Rosaleen, her caretaker or “stand in mother”, ran away from T.Ray, and went to Tiburon, South Carolina, the author is unclear about how they got to the bee house. She does explain that this town was important to Lily’s real mother, before she died. Kidd, also didn’t really explain the story behind her family before her mom died, and who her dad really is, and the whole part of why her and Rosaleen escaped from him.

I also thought this book wasn’t very good in my perspective because, there was really a big theme to it. Some minor themes of the story would be, forgiveness, when Lily has all the guilt of killing her mother, she asks from her mother in heaven for her forgiveness. Another theme could be racism, how T.Ray would hurt and mistreat Rosaleen because she wasn’t white like him and Lily. In addition to these themes, another would be, lack of female power, and how T.Ray (Lily’s father) had no respect for women and was against all idea’s any women had. One last theme in the book was the bee’s, which was one of the bigger themes because bee’s came in at lots of times during the story first with her mom, then in her room, and at the bee farm.

The Secret Life of Bees, was very confusing at some parts. The writing style was kind of wordy sometimes. Often I felt like I was falling behind while reading, and not understanding everything. Many times I felt like I had to reread to figure out where Lily and Rosaleen were in their travels. Sometimes there were parts when the author added some difficult vocabulary of places or names of things that I didn’t recognize and had to look up to figure out what they meant.