The Secret Life of Bees

This book is one of my all-time favorite books because it is so deeply spiritual, yet its spirituality is fully and unapologetically wedded to the everyday world, its trials and traumas, and its crying need for social justice.

I love how the spiritual nourishment of a sisterhood of strong women holds the potential to save a young girl’s life. Sue Monk Kidd’s writing grabbed me so powerfully that I have often picked up this book and read a few pages to inspire me before I began my own writing session.

This book is a great example of how a sense of place can essentially become one of the characters in a novel.

You can feel the heat of the South Carolina summer, where the young protagonist Lily escapes her father’s abusive home and, in searching for her mother’s past, finds a group of strong, independent, women who become her found family.

There is just a hint of magical realism in the writing – the world of the trio of black beekeepers seems sometimes fantastical, but it remains grounded by the setting amidst the racial powder keg of the mid-1960s south.

This book is such a wonderful story of strength in women.

It starts in the 50s which is the start of my era, and opens the truth about fighting racism, the fear of escape, and strength in loving bonds. I felt the pain of her not knowing her mother because my mother died before I was able to know her as a person.

I understand bonds and how love becomes strength. It was as if I was that little girl and I went on the journey with her. 

The Secret Life of Bees is a tender coming-of-age story revealing how nature is a guiding light for the 14-year-old protagonist in despair over her ‘ruined’ childhood. 

She is trapped at home with a cruel father after her mother died ten years before in a domestic violence tragedy.

Nature guides her into another life, but first she and her Nanny, must escape the ‘dark hive’ of misogyny and racial prejudice of their old home before landing anew by a series of synchronicities into the care of three sisters who own the Black Madonna Honey bee business.

They find good mothering,… show more.

At the center of The Secret Life of Bees is fourteen-year-old White girl Lily Owens, who is haunted by clouded memories of the afternoon her mother was killed. After her “stand-in mother” confronts racists in their town, they move to Tiburon, South Carolina, where they are taken in by three Black beekeeping sisters. There, Lilly finds a long-needed safe harbor in this mesmerizing novel about a bedrock longing for acceptance and the power, the divinity of the female spirit. Like a lot of kids from wildly dysfunctional Southern families, I ached for inclusion, for a sign that I was going… show more.

There are so many layers to this story that it’s almost a challenge to describe why it’s a brilliant book. Lily has a deep-seated desire to find out the truth, which is such a universal theme. But it’s not simply about truth; it’s about the relationship between a mother and daughter that is formed before birth and remains, in most cases, no matter what the outcome. What does this have to do with bees? A lot, because of the mirroring between the storyline and the bees proves a powerful message.

Grieving over the loss of her mother and the relentless abuse of her father, Lily goes in search of clues about her mother, hoping to find answers in a place she thinks her mother may have been connected with. During this quest, she finds herself having to examine her attitudes about interracial relationships. Kidd includes information about beekeeping and the black Madonna, both bodies of knowledge that symbolically contribute to the theme about roles that females play in the social order.