So excited!

I went to the movies the other weekend with my guy, and nearly tore the skin off of his arm when halfway through the previews I heard a skinny white girl say 'Rosaleen', and a handsome black man shout out 'June Boatwright'. He looked at me a little crazy, probably wondering why I was trying to scar him while staring at the movie screen and squealing like a little girl. After all...nobody else in the theater had that reaction. But that just means that I'm the only one in there fortunate enough to have read The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. Those poor strangers just don't know what they're missing!

I can remember getting my required reading list the summer before my senior year in high school, at a meeting of our senior AP English class. It was the first year my school offered AP English, and they wanted to make sure we all knew what we were getting into. There were just three books on my list, prompting me to think I was in for an easy summer...three books in two months? Nothing to it. There was Pygmalion, which I had already read, Things Fall Apart, which sounded good to me, and The Secret Life of Bees. I remember looking at it and thinking 'What kind of stupid ass title is that?' One of these days I'm going to learn that the whole thing about not judging a book by its cover is true...I ended up LOVING this book.

I don't know if it was the writing, which was so casual and informal and personal, or if it was the characters, who were so realistic to me that I felt like I really knew them. Maybe it was the plot, which was so intricate and yet at the same time so broad, or maybe it was the theme of universal motherhood and love. Or maybe it was the way I read it...that first time that summer, where I thought it was just great, and in more detail that second semester. We broke it down in chapters and really analyzed each one...the excerpts at the beginning of each chapter, and how they were central to not only that chapter, but the entire book. We studied world events that were happening during that time, studied the Civil Rights movement. We looked at suicide, at the Jerusalem Wailing Wall, at Mai-Tai cocktails, and interracial relationships. We studied this book from every angle, and each angle I saw, the more I fell in love with the book.

The movie comes out in a couple of weeks, and I just hope it can live up to the original novel. I doubt it, though, as so few movies do (I'm looking at you Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban!) It looked cute, though, and the scenes were easily recognizable from the book. Queen Latifah should make an excellent August, and now that I think about it...who else could play Lily but Dakota Fanning (who admittedly, does give me the creeps sometimes). I can't picture Jennifer Hudson as Rosaleen, but maybe she'll make the character hers. As soon as my sister gets back from New York at the end of the month, I'm dragging her and my mom to see this movie with me. It's a movie that mothers and daughters SHOULD watch together, as it's all about love between women, especially mother and daughter. We've had a rough year, the three of us, and I think a night away from everyone but each other, watching a movie that reminds us how lucky we are is just what we need. This movie, based on a book that I love, couldn't come at a better time for me. I cannot wait to watch Sue Monk Kidd's book come to life with the two women I love most.