Bees

WARNING THIS ARTICLE MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Last month the book club read Mad Honey by Jennifer Finney and Jodi Picoult. We actually met to discuss it somewhere else! A rare event for sure. Usually Book Club meetings take place here at Wildflower. But for a number of reasons, we decided to meet on the beautiful porch at the home of one of our members this time. We hung out in the shade talking about the book, life, and other writers and other books. We ate the most delicious pizza of all time, made on sight from the freshest most magnificent ingredients, in an outdoor pizza oven. I didn’t even mind getting sick, which is unavoidable due to my dairy allergy. The pizza tasted so good it was worth the consequences given by my dairy allergic stomach later. This was one of our more memorable meetings. I think everyone really enjoyed this get together because we truly could not wish for a better host or a better location to meet, or better food.

Mad Honey, was an interesting and artfully told story, well written, and most certainly worth the read. It contained some controversial elements, that while I thought were harped on a bit too much, others disagreed. Either way, I think it is one of the more important books of the moment. One I hope everyone will read. I love the way it made room for non cooky cutter characters and brought them to a general audience rather than relegating them to more nitch fiction markets. Society was really served by this book in a way books rarely serve society. Which isn’t to say that there are books that do not serve society. All books serve society. But not quite like this one. This one, takes us into a character whom most of us would never see ourselves in. But then, isn’t that the point? We are all the same. Human beings, no matter our differences. We all want and need the same things. Safety, privacy, to see our inner selves reflected in our outer selves. For most of us, this is something we can do with clothing. This book discusses this issue when it is not as simple as finding clothes that resonate with your internal self. What happens when your inner gender does not match your outer genitalia? Not so simple a thing to fix…

This story is told by two women. The mother of a young man on trial for murder and the girlfriend he is accused of killing. The mother, a bee keeper, tells the story carrying it forward through time as she vacillates between her own love story gone wrong and the story of her son’s murder trial. While she moves forward, the girlfriend of the young man on trial takes us backward through her own history, giving us a better view of who the world lost when she died.

Lily, the girlfriend, gives us an understanding of living a life most of us will never live in which our bodies don’t match our inner identities. Like Asher, the young man accused of killing her, Lily, has a strong mother who holds up the sky to save her daughter from a cruel father. Lily’s mom upends her life to give her daughter fresh start after fresh start, only to have her child try to end her own life…. Finally it becomes possible for a surgery to change things and one final new beginning to happen. Lily, is finally the person outside that she is inside. More importantly, at her new school she has met a boy and she is in love.  Should she tell him? Or shouldn’t she? Should she tell just him? Who does she have an obligation to tell? Or is her duty to protect her secret, in order to protect herself? Is having a physical relationship with this boy acceptable without telling him? The authors seem to be more woke than I am. Which is a really tough thing to be. Cuz I was raised by a commune of international hippy Buddhists. They don’t make ’em much more woke than me. But my problem here is that much of the book centers on her right to make choices for her body. Her not sharing her secret with him, deprives him of the ability to make choices for his body. That bothers me. If it is good for her to make choices for her body, we must allow him the same. The authors seemed to think her rights to keep her secret to protect herself were more important than his right to make a fully aware personal choice. That rubbed me very very wrong.

There are ways to respond to getting information of this unexpected kind from a partner you are seeking to be intimate with. None of those ways should involve violence, cruelty, or abuse. If someone does those things, they should be arrested, jailed, and hopefully never let out. But it is acceptable to say no thank you politely. Because everyone should get a say over what they do with their body. So the authors really lost me on that point.

I loved the comparisons made to bees that were laced throughout this story but I don’t know that they enhanced the story nor do I feel like they really added much of anything meaningful. But the answer to the mystery at the heart of this novel, was obvious to anyone who understands how colonies of bees work. I got it almost immediately, who had done it. Partly because… I keep bees. But the authors did a great job in creating alternative rabbit holes of possible killers. Less skilled authors would have failed to do this as effectively as these two authors did. Because they understood, that these characters have to have relevance to the story beyond simply existing within the text to be a possible answer to the mystery. So I liked how that was done, though I wasn’t fooled. 

Another thing that came up in our discussion of this book was a sense of frustration with the bee keeper mother of the young man on trial, Asher. The way she never kicked her lawyer brother defending her son out of the room to have  a candid conversation with her son, was really annoying and didn’t work for any of us. This character choice seemed to be unnecessary and thrown in just to build drama and it came off as a bit silly and stupid. As you read the internal fears and growing uncertainties about her son’s innocence. Constantly comparing him to his violent father and seeing his father in him… This annoyed me.

Everyone in this book has secrets. You walk through them all and finally uncover the darkest secret of all, Who killed Lily, a beautiful trans gender girl, who you only learn is trans about half way through the book. I thought leaving that unsaid till that point was a fabulous choice. It allows the reader to get to know who she is before learning about what she is. Allowing us to become attached to her character, and humanity before flipping a switch and forcing the reader to alter their imagined image and idea of Lily.

I grew up with trans people, played for a little while in high school in a band with some trans adults. I also have a trans aunt. I grew up aware of trans people. I grew up understanding them because they explained it to me. I don’t think I needed to read this book. I am already well versed in the concepts it speaks of, I have had these discussions with trans people. But far too few people are well versed. Far too few people do understand going through life feeling like you are in the wrong body. I can’t imagine anything more uncomfortable than that. On a smaller level and it isn’t the same thing, when I was young I never felt whole. There was a symbol I needed to have as part of my body. My inner self was deeply uncomfortable and felt like my body just wasn’t correct to my inner self without that symbol being part of me. The symbol was that of the Wiccan Goddess. A triple moon. Waxing and waning crescents, with a full moon in the center between them. I finally put it on my ankle. It was incredible. For the first time I felt at home in my own skin. I was internally the same person I was externally. On a much more extreme level, that is what trans people live every day. Who they are doesn’t match their body. Imagine living in the wrong body… It can’t be comfortable, it can’t feel good on any level. 

At the end of the day…. This story was about a tragedy, and a love so strong it defied cultural norms, rules, and taboos. It was about how deep love can be when we are willing to accept each other. Choosing partnership, trust, and understanding over abuse, vilification of each other’s differences, and personal choices. 

I am so glad someone wrote this book. I am so glad that general fiction, is being opened to characters we never get to welcome into our minds. It’s long over due that they find purchase within the worlds that live inside our minds while we read. I hope everyone will read this book. Because the more people who read this book the better and broader the world will become for all people and the more we will find understanding with a group that far too often gets viewed as other, rather than simply as people just like the rest of us. People, trying to live their truth, again, just like the rest of us. We need to welcome them into our fiction, into our world, and into our lives as equals and as people we love and care about. Because in every way that matters they are no different than anyone else.

Thank you for reading
Amanda of Wildflower Farm.