The Mermaid Chair

by Sue Monk Kidd

Sophomore effort. Not as good as Secret Life of Bees, but enjoyable nonetheless. This time the heroine is a middle aged woman whose only child has just left the nest. She's taking time to figure out who she is now while taking care of her mother, a religious fanatic who lives alone on an island off the SC coast who has inexplicably cut off her finger. It turns out that crazy mom feels guilt for the (extremely farfetched) way in which the father died years before. The heronine manages to fall in love at first sight with a monk who has not yet taken his final vows.

There is a real Mermaid Chair in a monestary in England.

Bread Alone by Judith Ryan Hendricks

Somewhat typical "women's book." Woman with no marketable skills gets left by controlling cheating husband. She allows him to walk all over her in the divorce, kicking her out of her home and generally treating her like dirt. Moves to Seattle and slowly gets her life together by becoming a baker. Good bread recipes. [HINT: Use half the yeast and let bread rise twice as long.]

Enjoyable, but not great. I may read the sequel.

Ya-Yas in Bloom by Rebecca Wells

As much as I loved Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, and even Little Altars Everywhere, I think I'm Ya-Ya'd out. I finished this a week ago and don' t remember anything distinctive about this one that would make it stand out from the other two. It's time for Wells to either rethink the characters -- since time stops in 1994, what's happened in the past 10 years? How do the Ya Ya's face death? -- or to come up with something new.

The Secret Life of Bees

By Sue Monk Kidd

This book is about a young girl in the south in 1964, and on one level, it has to take place at that place and at that time. Yet the story is universal -- about what it means to be motherless, who mothers are in our lives, whether the women who gave birth to us or the women who act as mothers to us, or the divine feminine, who is, in this novel, embodied in the Black Madonna . Or in the form of the queen bee, whose only function is to serve as eternal mother to the hive, living in constant darkness, laying eggs all her days. Yet, without her, the hive soon languishes and dies.

As August, the queen bee of the novel, says to Lily, "Our Lady is not some magical being out there somewhere like a fairy godmother. She's not the statue in the parlor. She's something inside you . . . You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mther, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside."

It's a coming of age novel, an American novel, a spiritual novel. Particularly for the motherless, a moving experience. Well written. I'm looking forward to her latest novel.