The Secret Life of Bees

from The Secret Life of Bees

This weekend we rented The Secret Life of Bees from Redbox, and really enjoyed it. It's the story of 14-year-old Lily, a young girl growing up on a peach farm in the south who is haunted by memories of her dead mother. Together with Rosaleen, her young black housekeeper, she flees her abusive father and ends up at the home of the cultured and resilient Boatwright sisters, a black family who make their living through beekeeping.

I've always thought Dakota Fanning is an incredible young actor, and I thought the movie did a great job of evoking a specific place and time period. It's hard for me to even imagine what life was like in the south in the 1960's, but they do a good job of capturing the side-by-side coexistence of an incredible amount of hope with an incredible amount of hate. It's also nice--though too rare--to see a movie written by women, largely produced by women, and starring mostly women, though there are several good men playing strong parts in the movie as well.

The movie is based on the bestselling novel by Sue Monk Kidd. I've never read it, although my teacher Mark had recommended it to me at one point, saying he thought I'd like it. He was right. I did.