GODS IN ALABAMA by Joshilyn Jackson

FIC

JACKSON

Arlene Fleet is a graduate student living in Chicago. For reasons unbeknownst to the reader. Arlene had left home in Alabama at the age of eighteen, and promised God to never return, to remain celibate and to never tell a lie.

She has been able to keep her promises until her African-American boyfriend wants to accompany her to Alabama to meet her lily-white family. Arlene would rather die. Not only is Arlene reluctant to introduce him to her crazy and bigoted family, but she has a deep dark secret that threatens to come out. Arlene finds she is no longer able to keep her promises.

THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES by Sue Monk Kidd

FIC

KIDD

The memory of the day Lily Owens, only four, accidentally shot her mother intrudes often into her mind. This, and the abuse she suffers for years at the hands of her father, trap Lily in pit of despair. She finally acts when her maid, the beloved Rosaleen on her way to register to vote under the new Civil Rights Acts, "assaults" three of the town's most vicious racists. Lily springs Rosaleen from the hospital and they set out for Tiburon, South Carolina, with only Lily's mother's picture of the Black Madonna to guide them.

Thus they come to the home of the three Boatwright sisters, the producers of Black Madonna honey. In their home Lily discovers both the past and her future, and there she learns to connect to the mother within herself.