I have been working my way through various US bestsellers of recent years, due to various manipulations of the top unread books lists in various places. This one is about a teenage white girl in about 1964, who flees her abusive father to the far side of South Carolina, where she ends up living with the same black family of bee-keepers who had sheltered her mother many years before. There’s lots of lovely symbolism in the processes of apiculture and (more unexpectedly) the Blessed Virgin Mary. I couldn’t help but notice, though, that the laudatory blurbs all seemed to be by white critics; I wonder how this has been received in the black community?