The Secret Life of Bees is a historical fiction novel by American author Sue Monk Kidd.
An angsty white teenager with a tragic backstory learns about self-acceptance and forgiveness with the aid of a feisty group of black women and unlikely members of the natural world.
The Secret Life of Bees was originally published in 2001. The novel has since sold more than eight million copies worldwide and has been translated into 36 languages. It also stayed on the New York Times best seller list for two and a half years. It won the 2004 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards (Paperback), and was nominated for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.
The novel was adapted into a 2008 award-winning film of the same name directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood starring Queen Latifah, Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Hudson, Alicia Keys, Sophie Okonedo, and Paul Bettany.
***Plot***
The year is 1964, a time in the US history that marked a breakthrough for the civil rights movement. The place is racially-charged South Carolina where tensions between whites and blacks are simmering.
The year is 1964, a time in the US history that marked a breakthrough for the civil rights movement. The place is racially-charged South Carolina where tensions between whites and blacks are simmering.
14-year old Lily Owens witnesses her black maid, Rosaleen, experience horrific racist abuse for a trivial altercation. She impulsively breaks Rosaleen out of jail and flees her troubled childhood home to get away from her emotionally distant and often abusive father.
Going only by an old and mystifying photograph belonging to her late mother, she lands on the doorstep of the Boatwright sisters in Tiburon, South Carolina. The three unmarried black sisters live in a pink house on a large bee farm and make a living selling honey. An inherited statue of a black Mary is at the crux of the sisters religious and spiritual beliefs. It stands as an eternal symbol of hope, strength and freedom for the oppressed.
Lily is accepted an as apprentice beekeeper and Rosaleen as a housekeeper by the eccentric Boatwright trio. They temporarily move in with the sisters. Lily is anxious to uncover the secret of her mother’s history and connect the dots that will reveal if her intuition that originally brought her to the Boatwright family was right.
Lily needs to come to terms with her past, overcome her regrets and learn how to forgive in order to find peace and start living again.
