The Secret Life of Bees

            The Secret Life of Bees, with first copywrite in 2002, is a coming-of-age novel written by Sue Monk Kidd.

Throughout the story, you follow the dramatic life events of a 14-year-old girl named Lily Owens. When you’re introduced to Lily, she’s motherless and desperately searches for her, she searches for a mother who would guide her and love her. She would do so as if she was looking for something to wear, searching in her dark closet extending her arms forward and groping aimlessly for the skin that would make her comfortably alive.

You follow this girl through tragedies and insecurities as she tries to gather understanding of people and the world, but ultimately, you follow her through the defining of her character and the struggle of developing her identity as she copes without a loving figure to guide her.

           

            The story is told in first person, from Lily’s point of view.

The book starts off by introducing Lily and her life as she’s come to know it. She discusses the tyranny of her father, Terrance Ray Owens, or T. Ray for short and the strained relationship they have that you find out is result from the loss of her mother, Deborah Fontanel Owens. The main cause for Lily’s troubles is that she accidentally killed her mother when she was just four, but later on in life she realizes that a mother is all she ever wanted, someone to relieve the misery of having no friends and practically being confined with her awful father who persists on taking away everything she comes to love. She’s so strung up about that fact that she doesn’t know whether to believe it or not and it causes an overall discombobulating of her life. Eventually, she runs away with Rosaleen, their housekeeper, who is the only source of love in her life besides a picture of her mother and her mother’s things. One of her mother’s things is a picture of a black-skinned virgin Mary pasted to a block of wood that has the words, ‘Tiburon, SC” written on the back of it. Lily thought that, since it was her mother’s thing, her mother must have been to Tiburon, South Carolina which was just a couple of hours from her own town. So Lily and Rosaleen took off to Tiburon and found their way into the arms of three black sisters, August, June, and May Boatwright who all live in one pink house where they make honey for a living. The label on the honey jars they make was the same picture she had of the black Mary, which led Lily to think that her mother had stayed with the Boatwright sisters. Rosaleen and Lily stayed there for a while learning about honey, the black Mary and falling in love with life and the sisters. Although after a while, T. Ray found Lily and confronted her.

I think the author intended the audience to be young people around Lily’s age since the book deals with problems dealing with discovering and building identity that most teenagers would also have problems with and this book serves as a guide for those young people.

The Secret Life of Bees is an American coming-of-age novel. I would say it fits into my life because the moral of the story is good reminder of how to live life in a way that makes you happy and that’s something that I usually need to be reminded of.

This book is definitely a page-turner, I assigned a prescribed amount of pages I would read a day to finish on time and I finished ten days early! The story sucks you in and really gets you invested in Lily’s life because the author created a situation that everyone an relate to in their own way and interesting circumstances that story takes place in.

The author’s style is quite natural and, honestly, refreshing, you get the impression that Lily’s heart is just open, or rather, wants to be. The inferences she makes about her surroundings are unique and interesting and the way she delivers them are interesting as well. You can tell that the author has inserted her own views about the world into Lily’s character. The way she wrote was very natural and easy, but also intriguing and innovative and it’s definitely appropriate for the intended audience.

           

The book affected me in that it’s nostalgic for me because I have a similar situation with my parents in that I don’t really have any parents and in that way, I connected with it on a personal level.

This novel serves as a wonderful guide for young people who are lost like Lily was. The story is accessible, but also different enough to be interesting and has enough of a moral to be meaningful. I found that, the book itself and its story becomes that missing mother for all the lost youths of the world.

This story is similar to other works I’ve come to know in that it has a significant moral relevant to life.

             I don’t agree with some of the story choices the author made, they seemed to cheapen the overall good impression of the book, although The Secret Life of Bees is just a good book and I don’t think anyone could not like it.

Cadence Gorman

12/16/13

RATING: **** 3.8/5