The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

In the year of 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed. In the novel The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, at that time period, a young girl named Lily Owens had a tough life and was forced to live alone with her abusive father since she accidently killed her mother, Deborah Owens. Lily now has to live with the fact that she killed her mother, and her father does not help her through it at all, but who does help her is one of Lily’s many and one of the most important mother figures which in Rosaleen, Lily’s nanny.Some awards that the book has won was New York Times Bestseller List and 2004 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards. The Secret Life of Bees grew, says Kidd "out of my Southern background and my intimacy with the racial wounds and tensions

Lily receives more and more mother figures throughout the novel, but the first real mother figure Lily had was Rosaleen. Lily realized that she has more mother figures than just Rosaleen when she gets to the Boatwright house. In the novel, August states “...because as long as people have been on this earth, the moon has been a mystery to us. Think about it. She is strong enough to pull the oceans, and when she dies away, she always comes back again.” (113) When August says this, she means that the moon plays a role of a mother figure because even when mothers go away or die, they will always come back like the moon. Also Lily states “And there they were. All these mothers. I have more mothers than any eight girls off the street. They are the moons shining over me.” (374) When Lily says this , she is realizing all the mother figures in her life and how important they are to her and how she needs them to shine over her like a moon. It is important for Lily to have as many mother figures in her life as she does since her actual mother died when she was young and she carries the guilt with her that is was her

Lily’s life is really hard with the fact that she killed her mother, and having T. Ray has her father who blames Lily for her mothers death and abuses her on top of that. By the end of the story, Lily realizes how much her life changed and got better with the help of Rosaleen, the Boatwright sisters and with T. Ray out of her life. The author included this line in the novel to show how most people in the world think dying is the worst thing, but Lily knew it wasn't because of what she had to deal with in her own life, but her idea on that might have changed by the end of the novel because of how her life got so much