Reading Books About the South Written by southern women

    I continue this quest of reading books about the South, written by southern women. Not quite sure when this started or where I am going with it, it seems more of a destination than a journey, but I will stay the course.  I received  The Secret Life of Bees a few days ago and just opening it now.  I am sure that a friend, someone whose taste I obviously trust,  told me about this book because I ordered it without knowing anything about it.   I just went to Amazon.com to get some information and read this: From Publishers Weekly  "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 towork 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. Facedwith 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...".   

Wow!! This sounds like a winner to me. I am going try and wait to read this when I go away at the end of the month. I have tried saving books to read at a later date before,  I always end up reading the novel in the next day or so :-(