3.8 out of 4 stars!
“When it’s time to die, go ahead and die, and when it’s time to live, live. Don’t sort-of-maybe live, but live like you’re going all out, like you’re not afraid.”
These words above were written in the suicide letter from May Boatwright. A black woman who lived in Tilburon, South Carolina and lost her twin sister, April, to suicide when they were both young children. May never returned to the person she was before that happened. It was as if she made everyone else’s problems her own and couldn’t shake the weight off her shoulders. May brought such life into her other sister’s lives, June and August, but she needed to do what would set her free from her dark cloud that followed her without her twin.
Similar to May’s loss, a few towns over in Sylvan, South Carolina, a fourteen year old white girl named Lily Owens, who shot her mother by mistake at the age of four also feels as if she is alone and tortured. A girl without her mother and a father that can’t even look at her after the mistake she made while holding a gun that day.
What overlaps and brings these two woman together to live under the same house? May’s sister, August. A beekeeper in Tilburon. I do not want to give away how they all piece together but the path will be one of the most touching and heartwarming things you have read in a while.
Kidd starts each chapter with a fact about bees and the life lessons that one can take from researching the phenomenon of a queen bee and her colony.
An absolute exquisite story that I HIGHLY recommend. I wish I read this at a younger age. I believe a lot of people read while in high school and it is a regret I didn’t get the chance to be introduced sooner. I have an incredibly close relationship with my mother. She is one of my best friends. However, I have always felt a void of not growing up with a sister. This book demonstrates that you don’t have to be blood or grow up with someone to find the power inside to be a queen bee! I love to read that.
I mentioned during the book challenge that I partook in that one of my favorite character relationships was with Mae Mobley and Aibileen Clark but the relationship with Lily and August is up there now.
Please do yourself a favor and bring in this sunshine southern book full of joy during these long winter months! Here is Sadie after she finished the book :
