La Vida Secreta de las Abejas

Secretos y sentimientos se mezclan en esta novela. La joven Lily vive afligida por la muerte de su madre, y se siente culpable. Desea recordar algœn momento de alegr’a en la vida de su madre, pero solo tiene la escena borrosa de su muerte. Lily y su madrastra emprender‡n una aventura hacia un lugar que desconocen, donde Lily encontrar‡ lo que ha estado buscando. Con una lectura clara, Cristina Arsuaga, que asemeja ser una peque–a ni–a, es en ocasiones tan inocente. Capturando también tonalidades diversas en su voz, logrando recrear los diferentes personajes, y otorgando al lector una serie de sensaciones y emociones, que dejan un nudo en la garganta. M.B.M. 2006 Audie Award Finalist [ENGLISH TRANSLATION]--This emotional novel mixes secrets and feelings. The young Lily lives afflicted by the death of her mother and suffers from unrepressed guilt. She tries to remember a single moment of happiness in her mother's life but only retains a blurred scene of her death. Lily and her stepmother undertake an adventure to an unknown place, where the child finds what she seeks. In her clear voice, Cristina Arsuaga, on occasions so innocently, makes herself a small child. She also captures other tones of voice to create personalities that bestow the listener with a mixture of sensations and emotions strong enough to leave a lump in the throat. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

November 12, 2001
Honey-sweet but never cloying, this debut by nonfiction author Kidd (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter features a hive's worth of appealing female characters, an offbeat plot and a lovely style. It's 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act, in Sylvan, S.C. Fourteen-year-old Lily is on the lam with motherly servant Rosaleen, fleeing both Lily's abusive father T. Ray and the police who battered Rosaleen for defending her new right to vote. Lily is also fleeing memories, particularly her jumbled recollection of how, as a frightened four-year-old, she accidentally shot and killed her mother during a fight with T. Ray. Among her mother's possessions, Lily finds a picture of a black Virgin Mary with "Tiburon, S.C." on the back—so, blindly, she and Rosaleen head there. It turns out that the town is headquarters of Black Madonna Honey, produced by three middle-aged black sisters, August, June and May Boatwright. The "Calendar sisters" take in the fugitives, putting Lily to work in the honey house, where for the first time in years she's happy. But August, clearly the queen bee of the Boatwrights, keeps asking Lily searching questions. Faced with so ideally maternal a figure as August, most girls would babble uncontrollably. But Lily is a budding writer, desperate to connect yet fiercely protective of her secret interior life. Kidd's success at capturing the moody adolescent girl's voice makes her ambivalence comprehensible and charming. And it's deeply satisfying when August teaches Lily to "find the mother in (herself)"—a soothing lesson that should charm female readers of all ages. (Jan. 28)Forecast:Blurbs from an impressive lineup of women writers—Anita Shreve, Susan Isaacs, Ursula Hegi—pitch this book straight at its intended readership. It's hard to say whether confusion with the similarly titled
Bee Season will hurt or help sales, but a 10-city author tour should help distinguish Kidd. Film rights have been optioned and foreign rights sold in England and France.