I do it whether it suits others or not. As long as it suits me, I’m in. It sounds selfish but I don’t think I am, particularly. There just comes a point in a girl’s life when she realizes that happiness is not something that is delivered on a silver plate borne aloft by half a dozen well-oiled bronze musclemen all wearing loincloths of a certain shade of mauve.
It is something she chooses to have and goes about finding, even if other people think she’s showing off, which (if she is) she’s sorry about, but that’s not going to stop her. Maybe she’s not too big for her boots. Maybe her boots were too big to begin with and she’s finally just filling them. Of course most women can’t just up and go trouncing around the world at the drop of a hat. I’m lucky because (a) I’m paid to do it, (b) I have a very understanding husband who says as long as I’m happy his life is easy, and (c) we don’t have children to take to ukulele lessons or put through college.
But traveling may not be what brings other women happiness. For some it’s a new home, possibly without the same old dreary other half in it. Or it’s a change of job, from the thankless one they’ve ground away at for years to one that pays less but brings them joy. Or it’s getting that last lazy twenty-something offspring to move out of the house so she can have her sewing room back. It might be a new hairdo or a new sexual freedom or a new insistence on wearing unfeasibly high stilettoes, but it’s still a big fat YES.
In The Wedding Bees, Sugar Wallace has already discovered the joys of travel, and friendship, and (of course) honey, but until she says yes to life’s sweetest elixir, love, happiness continues to elude her . . . that pot of gold always just out of reach.
Luckily for her, she doesn’t even have to wait forty years to see it.
Read on
Reading Group Guide
1. When George first meets Sugar he observes: “I don’t get to meet many people like you these days. You new in town?” How is Sugar different from the New Yorkers that George is used to? And even though she’s a newcomer, are there ways that she fits right into her new home?
2. Sugar’s father says that “Wallaces don’t clean up other people’s messes. That’s just not what we do,” and Sugar says, “I don’t rescue people, that’s just so sappy.” But her longtime friend Jay says, “Sugar, you are a one-woman detox center stroke guidance counselor stroke bank teller stroke babysitter stroke you name it.” Who is right? What motivates Sugar when she bonds with other people?
3. Why does Sugar seem so alarmed by Theo’s impetuous honesty about how he fell in love with her at first sight? Do you think he crossed a line? Why does the usually free-spirited Sugar seem to think he did?
4. What do you make of Ruby’s obsession with wedding announcements? What do they represent for her? Would she have approved of Sugar and Grady’s fairytale wedding?
5. Early on in the novel, George tells Sugar, “Where you’re from is where you’re from and a person will always miss it. There’s just no getting away from that.” Do Theo and Sugar miss where they’re from, or are they happier where they’re transplanted? How do Sugar’s feelings about where she’s from change once she goes back to Charleston?
6. Sugar’s brother Ben tells her that he feels stuck in his life as a successful lawyer, and says, “I’ve envied you over the years, carving out a different life for yourself, going where the wind blows you. That takes guts.” Do you envy Sugar? Could you do what she did? Would you want to?
7. Food is perhaps the most important way that Sugar relates to the people in her life, from the cakes and cocktails she makes to cement her relationships with her neighbors to her observation about her mother that despite “all her faults, she could make a really good pie.” What role does food play in your life? Are there certain recipes or dishes that are important to your relationships?
8. Of all the happy endings in The Wedding Bees, which is your favorite and why? Sugar and Theo’s wedding? Mr. McNally and Mrs. Keschl’s? Ruby’s? Lola’s?
9. The author, Sarah-Kate Lynch, opens this novel with a dedication: “In praise of random acts of kindness, good manners, and guardian angels.” Whose random acts of kindness carry the most weight? Whose good manners are most sorely tested (or most appreciated)? And which of the characters do you think are the guardian angels of this story?
Also by Sarah-Kate Lynch
Finding Tom Connor
Blessed Are the Cheesemakers
By Bread Alone
Eating with the Angels
The House of Daughters
On Top of Everything
Dolci di Love
Credits
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover and spine photographs by Laura Klynstra
Author photograph © Rock NYC
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book was originally published in Australia in 2013 by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited.
P.S.TM is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE WEDDING BEES. Copyright © 2013 by Sarah-Kate Lynch. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2014.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-0-06-225260-9
EPUB Edition FEBRUARY 2014 ISBN 9780062252616
14 15 16 17 18 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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