Sue Monk Kidd
336 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
An appealing coming-of-age story, The Secret Life of Bees is narrated by 14-year-old Lily Owens, who runs away from a South Carolina peach farm and a spiteful father who blames her for her mother's death 10 years prior.

Lily, accompanied by her African-American nanny, Rosaleen, makes her way across the state to Turbon. The two find haven in the home of three eccentric beekeeping sisters, where Lily gradually comes to terms with the loss of her mother. She finds surrogate mothers, love, and wisdom as she completes her journey to wholeness.

While this is her debut as a novelist, Kidd has been a writer of inspirational books for 20 years. Her concerns are the inner workings of the soul: the need to find meaning in life and to experience the divine, however we define it. This book is the fictional reworking of these themes. Lily, in finding herself, finds the divine archetypal feminine, the great universal mother who resides within and empowers each of us.

The book is replete with metaphors: the beehive, honey, and queen bee stand in for concepts of home, love, and the uber-feminine. At times these symbols feel programmatic, serving as an illustration of a theme rather than an oil painting, rich with undertones and layered meanings.

Still, I enjoyed reading Bees, very much. Kidd's prose is light and fluid, creating a fable-like aura in parts. And Lily's adolescent voice is perfectly pitched. So I agree with those who say that this is a book for mothers and daughters to share and pass down for years to come.

Go to our Readers Guide for

Wallace Stegner, 1987
368 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
Like other famous authors who claimed to write small (Jane Austen's miniatures on "a little bit of ivory" and William Faulkner's "postage stamp" of native soil), Wallace Stegner says of Crossing to Safety that he "was trying to make very small noises and to make them thoughtful." He succeeded on both counts, creating an intimate, thoughtful portrait of friendship between two married couples over a 35-year span.

Stegner isn't a household name, though he should be. He had a long and prolific career, writing more than 30 books: novels, story collections, and non-fiction. He won awards and taught his craft to writers better known than he. His best known work is Angle of Repose, which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1972.

This novel delves into the friendship and marriages of the Morgans and Langs, who first met as young academics during the Depression years. The book opens in 1972, in Vermont, where the Morgans have traveled to visit Charity Lang, now dying of cancer. Told as a series of flashbacks by Larry Morgan, the work ponders the nature of youthful expectations and goals unfulfilled, the dynamics of marriage, the power of personality, and dependence, all set against the evocative beauty of Vermont's natural landscape.

Charity and Sid's relationship is central to the story, and Charity becomes the book's most powerful figure, obsessive, domineering, even cruel, but also loving and generous. Sid suffers under her control. Or he seems to, which is the question left unanswered at the book's end: will he live without Charity?

This is such a beautiful book. The characters burrow into your heart, and Stegner's prose, as one critic put it, is "prismatic, lush and painterly." Don't miss this one.

See our Reading Guide for

William Faulkner, 1936
313 pp.

Later, Quentin's father tells him a different version of the same story, one he'd heard years ago from his father, who got it from Thomas Sutpen himself. Get it? We're hearing the story third-hand. Later that fall, Quentin tells the story to his Harvard roommate, who gets in on the act, speculating and creating his own version of what happened. Each telling reveals more of the mystery. What makes the work so compelling is that the "history" is open to multiple interpretations and speculation. So we're never really sure of the "truth." Welcome to literary modernism and to Faulkner. Buckle your seatbelts!

Faulkner is the Beethoven of the literary world, a writer who defies classic form, who ponders fate, and whose bass notes drive his stories forward. This novel takes on one of Faulkner's major themes: the destruction, or self-destruction, of the South, through human will, racism, slavery, and miscegenation. For Faulkner, though, things are never clear-cut.