Last night’s hit on the Brian Kenny Show is up. Will be on AllNight tonight (taped), First Take on ESPN2 tomorrow at 11 am EDT, and ESPN 710 in Los Angeles tomorrow at 1:12 pm PDT.
UPDATE: Analysis of last night’s trades is up now.
I had avoided Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees
The story is narrated by Lily, a preteen girl who vaguely remembers a childhood accident when she was four years old where she picked up a gun and shot her mother while her parents were fighting. She’s haunted by guilt and her lack of memories of her mother, and lives with an unloving and occasionally abusive father who appears to want no part of her, handing off the task of rearing her to one of the black peach-pickers on his farm, Rosaleen. When the Civil Rights Act is passed and Rosaleen goes into town to vote, she ends up in an argument with three local redneck racists, which leaves her beaten up and arrested; Lily decides to spring her and they both run away to a small town in South Carolina where Lily thinks her mother once visited or lived. Once there, they run into three sisters* straight out of The Well of Stock Characters, including the most cliched of all, the wise older black woman who dispenses sound advice on matters life and spirit. As you might imagine, someone dies, Lily’s father shows up, there’s a lot of crying, and the end is heart-warming but just a touch ridiculous.
* The wise woman is played by Queen Latifah in the film version, where all three sisters are much younger than their counterparts in the book. What I find interesting is that another sister is played by Sophie Okenodo, who probably seldom finds herself as only the second-most beautiful woman in a movie, which had to be the case here with the third sister played by Alicia Keys. That’s some good casting work.
I couldn’t really get past the vaguely patronizing portrayals of black women in the book, and of course, just about every male character is one-dimensional and the dimension is unflattering. The lone exception is the lone African-American male to get any significant page time, a teenaged boy named Zach who is one-dimensional in how good he is. The dialogue is clumsy and heavy, laden with Big Meaning, Kidd hit only a few notes right for me – I enjoyed her portrayal of the feminist twist on Catholicism that the sisters and their friends practice, and some of the beekeeping information was interesting although the metaphors were a bit obvious – but on the whole it wasn’t worth my time.
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Also disappointing was Russ Atwood’s Losers Live Longer
Next up: Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock