A wonderful book about girl, Lily, who lost her mother at age 4 and is living with her mean father T. Ray and big black nanny Rosaleen in South Carolina in 1964. Lily has no friends and has a huge hole in her where her mother should be. So this book is about how she heals in the midst of a group of wonderful black women. It is a coming of age story, it has a couple of gentle love stories, it is powerful in its Civil Rights era setting, showing how blacks were proud to register to vote, which got the whites riled up and we see two nasty incidents between the races ending up with arrests. But mostly it is about the power of women to heal, to mother each other, to relate to the divine mother, Mary. The figure of the Black Mary was moving. And this wonderful story is set in a hot southern summer surrounded by bees. The author had researched beekeeping and had Lily land amongst 3 beekeeping “Calendar sisters” - August, May & June. August is the main mothering one and May in an interesting character deeply affected by the pain and sorrow of others. She had built a wailing wall, to which she would bring her pain. [Stop reading if you don’t want the ending spoiled.] To answer the questions at the end of the book, this is what I think will happen: Lily grows up to be a very strong woman, who finally sees the pain her father has suffered and she goes to see him, to tell him her life is in order, though he never appreciated it. She does become a beekeeper and takes over the bee farm, but she is also a writer – after she has gone to college. Rosaleen stays on the farm till they end of her days and is active in the community (after her charges are dropped), maybe opening a bakery or something. Lily and Zach get married and he is a lawyer in town, but he gets involved in major civil rights cases. I don’t know if they live in the pink house or build their own.
(read over spring break, completed April 6, 2005).
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