Secret Life

(TS) In Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees, August Boatwright helps reunite her sisters and her community by using the faith in the Black Madonna as a way to improve the quality of their lives. (PS) The faith within the Black Madonna improved Lily Owens’ and the Boatwright’s lives because they had to find a spiritual mother within themselves. (SS) Since August practiced the philosophy of the Black Madonna, she tells Lily, “You have to find a mother inside yourself” (Kidd 288). (SS)…

Sue Monk Kidd’s coming of age novel The Secret Life of Bees has many themes, a major one being that women are powerful. There is no lack of female characters, and each is strong in their own way, and as a community they are an incredible force, something the protagonist Lily comes to realize over the course of the story. In the opening of this story, Lily is in a society where women are not highly valued. This is implied through the times; the sixties wasn’t exactly known for the best…

particularly in the southern United States. In The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, a young white girl named Lily, is motherless and lives without a strong feminine role in her life. She is taken under the wing of the Boatwright sisters, three charismatic African-American women. With them, Lily learns strength and confidence, allowing her to grow into an influential woman in the world, despite everyone working against her. The Secret Life of Bees explores the empowerment of women through…

In The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, a fiction novel, Lily, a fourteen year old girl learns about her past, including the death of her mother and her father’s true feelings for her. She travels with her fill in mom Rosaleen, to try to find a new and better life.Many reviews state how pleasurable this book was. Book magazine states: “Maybe it’s true that there are no perfect books, but i closed this one believing that i had found perfection.” (Monk Kidd) “Someone who thinks death is the…

The film The Black Balloon (2008) directed by Elissa Downs, and the short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1939), written by James Thurber both explore the theme of Belonging through characters, scenes, film/text techniques etc. The film The Black Balloon is about how Thomas, an adolescent who wants nothing more than to be normal, deals with his autistic brother, Charlie. 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' is about a rather uninteresting man shopping with his wife, who enters vividly…

Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees is an exemplary novel which reveals the racism, sexism, and overall discrimination that unfolded in the south. The Secret Life of Bees transports the reader to the year of 1964 in South Carolina, where racial tensions were almost as high as the temperatures and people were surrounded by oppression. During this humid summer a young girl named Lily Owens runs away from her abusive father T. Ray, in search of her mother's past and the truth behind her tragic…

Bill Watterson once said, "There's no problem so awful, that you can't add some guilt to it and make it even worse." In each of our lives, we encounter problems that cause us pain or make mistakes that burden us with guilt. In the novel The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd shows us someone who suffers a tremendous loss at her own fault. The protagonist, fourteen year old Lily Owens, accidentally shoots and kills her mother as a small child, causing her to loathe herself. Lily must face the…

‘’ People who think dying is the worst thing don 't know a thing about life’’ (Sue Monk Kidd).It means that even by living and going through life, things aren’t always as they seem like living with someone else’s death can be more painful than dying. Authors generally write books to convey messages, teach life lesson or to demonstrate the social problem depending on the era the book is based on. Sue Monk Kidd and Harper Lee are the authors who were able to transmit lessons and messages through…

The Secret Life of Bees is a novel about a 14 year old girl, Lily, living in a time of segregation. She grows up in the time of the Civil Rights act. After reading The Secret Life of Bees book, we watched and compared it to the movie. A movie based on a book wouldn’t follow the exact plotline. There were key differences, but the movie followed a similar plotline. There were extra things added into the movie, and there were things left out. The movie immediately begins with Lily talking about…

In the book “Secret life of bees” an emotional historical fiction book written by Sue Kidd, Lily wants her mother more than anything in the world, But her mother is gone, so Lilly is trying to find information about her mother and where she went and Lily try's to find a new family. Throughout “Secret life of Bees”, Lilly is struggling to get over her mother’s death, but 3 african american women show Lilly that family can be found when least expected and love can be found in strange and wondrous…