Summer Reading Book 6

Title: The Secret Life of Bees

Author: Sue Monk Kidd

My Response: I really enjoyed this novel, I started apprehensibly, not knowing really what I was going to be reading. When I began to read I knew Lily and I were very similar in that I have often wondered about things that I was too old to even understand. My example being in this story, Lily has always wondered why her mother had left her and if she really had a part in her mother's untimely death. I will not disclose whether or not she did because I do not want to ruin the whole story for those who decide to read this book. My grade is a 95/100. The only problem I had with the story is how fast everything seem to happen. I did enjoy the beautiful imagery of the bees and the bee hives. The parallelism between Lily and the bees was also a great addage to the story.

Plot: 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their South Carolina peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words "Tiburon, South Carolina" scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily's beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think of--Tiburon, South Carolina--determined to find out more about her dead mother.

Grade: 95/100