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Our Decade's "Color Purple" Everyone feels the need to compare books to what we've already read. I don't know if that is fair, an insult, or a compliment. It is what we all do though. If the comparisons to yesteryear are to be believed and "My Fractured Life" (Rikki Lee Travolta) is being considered this decade's "Catcher in the Rye" (JD Salinger) - a point I actually don't take issue with - then "Secret Life of Bees" (Sue Monk Kidd) should just as equally be considered this decade's "Color Purple" (Alice Walker). It is a coming of age story of a young girl who learns what it is to be a woman and what it is to be black (although in this case as a white girl in the care of blacks she is learning from the outside as opposed to in the Color Purple where it was a black girl learning herself). Like "My Fractured Life" and "Life of Pi", whether we call it our decades "Color Purple" or anything else, "Secret Life of Bees" is surely one our decade's classics.