Monk

The Secret Life of Bees follows Lily Owens, a 14-year-old girl, who lives a very difficult life. She believes she caused her mother’s death and is searching for the truth, but she does not get any answers from her father, T. Ray, who abuses her throughout her childhood. Lily eventually becomes fed up with the abuse and Lily and Rosaleen, their maid, run away to Tiburon, South Carolina in hopes of finding the truth about her mother’s death. In Tiburon Lily learns many life lessons, including the…

there was much segregation and racism followed by major attempts to integrate the country. In the late 1900s there was many attempts to integrate and equalize the country. This is not only the setting by which the novel The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd takes place but also one of the major reasons that the story came to be. The racism during this time period in the book is one of the major reasons that Lily breaks Rosleen out of jail. For my project I decided to bake cupcakes that…

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a novel takes place in 1964 down in South Carolina. A teenage white girl, Lily Owens, and the black woman who raised her, Rosaleen, broke out of jail and fled to Tiburon, South Carolina to escape her past. Throughout the book there are events that shape her: Lily lying about her identity, when she finds out about her mother, and when her father finds Lily. Lily and Rosaleen arrive in Tiburon after running from the police because of a situation that…

Throughout the novel, The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd sends the main character, Lily, on a journey to better understand where her mother came from. Lily was raised from an early age strictly by T. Ray, her father, who does not have a good or close relationship with her at all. Although T. Ray is only directly with Lily at the beginning and end of the novel, he affects Lily throughout the whole story. Kidd communicates that all people love differently by choosing to use T. Ray as both an…

Author Sue Monk Kidd was raised in a small town named Sylvester, Georgia, a town that had a deep influence in the writing of her first novel The Secret Life of Bees. She went to school and graduated from Texas Christian University in 1970 and after took creative writing courses at Emory University and Anderson College, as well as studying at Sewanee, Bread Loaf, and along with going to many writer’s conferences throughout the years. This book is a coming of age fiction book. a coming of age book…

The book, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd opens with a fourteen year old white girl, Lily Owens. She lives in Sylvan, South Carolina with her abusive father T. Ray and her housemaid, Rosaleen. Lily was only four years old when her mother died. She heard that it was because of her as well, and this is the only memory she has of her. The only physical items from her mother she had were a pair of gloves and a picture of a black Mary. Rosaleen decides to register to vote once the Civil…

process can be a difficult journey. Through the influence of others and experiences a person’s identity begins to unfold. The identity is a necessary part of the human experience and shapes a person into who they are, leading them to their future. In Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, Lily’s broken identity and haunting memory of her mother pushes her towards Tiburon and the identity altering…

but a true family stays together and this passage shows that after Lily and August make it through the truth they will have a stronger bond that no one could break, not even Lily’s father in the end. In this historical fiction novel book by Sue Monk Kidd, Secret Life of Bees shows that family is people who love you and stay with you through thick and thin, their the people you hold dearly to your hearts. This novel shows that through racism, love and beekeeping, you can form an unbreakable…

The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem When August was telling Lily about May she said, “Everything just comes to her- all the suffering out there- and she feels as if it’s happening to her” (Kidd 95). The Secret Life of Bees is a story about a girl named Lily who runs away from home to find a family called the Boatwright’s. They are cultured woman who are like mothers to Lily. May, who stands in as one of Lily’s mothers, has a tough time coping with life so she builds her own little Wailing Wall in her…

The moon has always been a strong symbol throughout human culture, representing mystery and time and, throughout many cultures, femininity. In The Secret Life of Bees, the moon makes many appearances, from the space program to Lily’s dreams to it’s typical position in the sky. The author uses the moon to tie the whole story together through repeated symbolism and themes, serving as one of the many motifs of the book. One of the first major uses of the Moon comes from a dream Lily has after she…