«In this first novel by the author of The Invention of Wings, Lily Owens — daughter of a South Carolina peach farmer and a mother who was killed when Lily was just four — has since adopted a fierce-hearted black woman named Rosaleen as her «stand-in mother». But after Rosaleen insults three of the worst racists in town, the pair must flee to remote Tiburon, South Carolina, where they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters — May, June, and August — and enter their mesmerizing secret world of bees and honey and the Black Madonna, who presides over this household of strong, wise women. «I am amazed that this moving, original, and accomplished book is a first novel. It is wonderfully written, powerful, poignant, and humorous, and takes a line which is — refreshingly — strongly female without being cliché-feminist. It is also deliciously eccentric, which lifts it out of the usual category of a rite-of-passage novel into the realms of real distinction. DO read it».»