#11 in Contemporary fiction
The Secret Life of Bees
- 303
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“The Secret Life of Bees” tells a coming-of-age story from the American South of 1964 in prose that some readers single out for its beauty. It handles loss and the racial divisions of the civil-rights years with warmth and hope, and even some people handed it as a school assignment end up liking it. Others, though, struggle to connect with the characters or find certain turns of the plot puzzling.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Secret Life of Bees is a novel by American author Sue Monk Kidd. Set in 1964, it is a coming-of-age story about loss, betrayal, and the interracial landscape of the civil-rights era of the American South. The book received critical acclaim and was a New York Times bestseller. It won the 2004 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards (Paperback), and was nominated for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.7 across 610 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 81% of the weight and the score stays at 7.7 — the Contemporary fiction average of 7.7 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.0 | 44 | 7% |
| Hardcover | 7.7 | 566 | 93% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Secret Life of Bees?
It has 303 pages — shorter than 70% of the ranked books in Contemporary fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Contemporary fiction — with scores between 7.2 and 8.2, closest to this book.
