The Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd (2002)
“A fourteen-year-old girl fleeing a lie about her mother finds what she was actually looking for: a family she chose and a faith she built herself.”
Character Analysis
Fourteen, bookish, motherless, burdened by a false guilt T. Ray has built into her. Lily is an intelligent narrator who doesn't always understand what she's narrating — the gap between her real situation and her self-narrative is where the novel's meaning lives. Her arc is from isolation to community, from invented grief to real grief, from a perfect imagined mother to the capacity to mother herself.
Educated beyond her environment — she reads everything, her metaphors are literary — but her voice is still Southern and adolescent. She code-switches between farm-girl and aspiring writer.