Week 6: The Secret Life of Bees

I finished reading The Raging Quiet by Sherryl Jordan and am now reading The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. Sue won numorous awards Quill Award in General Fiction and the Southeastern Library Association Fiction Award. The Secret Life of Bees is quite depressing so far. It’s about this 14 year old girl named Lily Owens whose mother died when she was four. The story starts off with her lying in her bed watching bee’s swarm around her ceiling. I absolutely love the imagery in this part of the story. Sue writes “…a high pitched zzzzzzz that hummed along my ski. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark…” I almost got goosebumps when I reread this line. The main character thinks that bees swarm before death and starts to think about the summer her mother died. She was four years old. Her mother was “cleaning the closet” and fighting with T-Ray, Lily’s father. Lily ran to her mother but was stopped by T-Ray who threw her into the hallway. When he did this, her mother drew out a gun and aimed it at her husband. He hit it out of her hands and it landed on the floor. Lily picked it up and all she can remember is the loud boom that filled the room and her head to this day.