The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

What do bees have to do with a young girl enduring a most unfortunate family situation living in the south? Fourteen year old Lily is painfully aware that her cruel father doesn’t care about her. She longs for her loving mother who she vaguely remembers was always there to take care of her. Her ignorance of any other way of life causes her to despair of all hope. In the book The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd the main character, Lily is torn between experience of her painful family situation with an abusive father; ignorance of her mother and a better life available to her.

Lily is constantly aware of her cruel and abusive father. Her father, T-Ray always ignores Lily and tells her that when she goes to work the peach stand she

Lily remembers being very close to her mother, and Lily was only four years old when her mother died. Lily was really depressed and mad at herself because she knew that she was the reason that her mother died. This quote states that “Lily is sustained by her wit and latent strength of character but at the same time by a profound need to make sense of powerful and confusing memories concerning her mother, Deborah, who died when she was four years old”(Monk Kidd). Years later when she was working in the peach stand, T-Ray came out and told her that she didn’t kill her mother but that her mother ran away and abandoned her. Lily says that “I lay in bed and thought about dying and going to be with my mother in paradise. I would meet her saying, Mother forgive. Please forgive” (Monk Kidd, 3). Not knowing the truth about her mother was part of her ignorance of knowing a better life available to

After being abused by her father for so long, Lily decides to run away with Rosaleen to Tiburon, a town that was written on the back of one of her mother’s pictures.

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the author say that “Lily finds a picture of a black Virgin Mary with Tiburon S.C. on the back so, blindly, she and Rosaleen head there”(Zaleski). Lily finds a family in Tiburon, the Boatwright’s that will let her stay as long as she wants to. With the Boatwright’s she learns about bees and how to get honey from them and they help her understand who she really is. As Lily gets more comfortable with the family she decides to tell them the truth and finds out that they knew her mother. The bees and the beekeepers help Lily find out that there is definitely a better world available to her.

In The Secret Life of Bees, Lily overcomes her fears and present troubles to attain a better life. Lily longs for the truth about her mother and finds that truth is hiding in Tiburon South Carolina. She is painfully aware that her father might come and take her back to the horrible life she used to live. However she learns that the bees are free, that they live and rely on each other, and she tries to be free and happy like them. Lily soon discovers and comes to terms with her mother’s past, learns about beekeepers and is happy that she can now trust people and have friends that are like