The secret life of bees by Sue Monk Kidd

Sue Monk Kidd's novel the Secret Life of Bees depicts the metamorphosis of a young white girl raised by a black caretaker, Rosaleen and her father in a town in South Carolina, in the sixties. One of the characteristics that makes a literary work a masterwork is that of producing a process of transformation in its reader. The other one is its artistic value.

The journey the fourteen-year-old Lily undertakes in the novel is a journey that mirrors the transformations society in her time underwent. The contemporary reader is fascinated with the simplicity of this story while immersing in a world of phantasm and realism at the same time. Lily's imagination discovers new worlds and helps her have a better grasp of reality. The narrator's voice, Lily herself, tells the story of her life. She lives with her father and Rosaleen, her black caretaker, on her father's peach farm. Her mother died when she was four and the reader is allowed to guess that Lily accidentally killed her while her parents were engaged in a fight over her mother's immediate intention to leave. With a careless father whom she calls T. Ray and Rosaleen as her only loving figure, Lily escapes in a world of imagination every time she gets the chance. It is reality, however, that will determine her to leave the farm and follow a dream she had of discovering a world that seemed on the other side of the planet, or even in a different universe, regardless of the fact that it is a city only two hours away from her birth place. The reality of the sixties was that of the civil rights movement and South Carolina was one of the places where prejudices were among the hardest things to change. After Rosaleen ends up in the hospital, severely beaten by the very men who were suppose to protect society from evil, the policemen, Lily decides to change everything and helps her leave the hospital and together they leave the town.

The Odyssey begins and what lies ahead is destined to produce radical transformation not only in the two, but also in the lives of those they will encounter. The story is full of symbolism and surprising metaphors. The combination between symbolism and realism, although risky is handled by the hands of a master. The story is charming and powerful at the same time. Lily's arrival at the bee farm named Boatwright and owned by sisters named after the months is like the transcendence of an epic hero into another world. On one hand, there is the peach farm, ruled by T. Ray, a dinosaur who is bound to be extinct, on the other side, there is the Boatwright house, whose spiritual life revolves around a black Madonna, ruled by August Boatwright. What keeps the two worlds together is television that broadcasts news on the evolution of events in the fight for civil rights that was happening at the time in the U.S. Prejudices regarding skin color differences are also present in the Boatwright house. August Boatwright is the catalyst of the house and Lily finds not only comfort in her, but also a sister soul. She has a vivid imagination doubled by a deep understanding of the human nature and thus her stories are acting like parables. The story telling is similar to some point to that of Boccacio's Decameron. People will find a something in common with their own experiences and learn something out of them without feeling punished or admonished or even pointed at. One of the lessons Kidd is teaching here through Lily's adventures is that of racism, viewed both from the white and black perspectives.

Spirituality is omnipresent in the book, from the way Lily thinks of her mother as her guardian angel to the new religion she discovers in the Boatwright household, half Christian half self-made. The two worlds she lives in are separated by the same trace and that is where the master work of Kidd is revealed. A simple phrase is revealing more than an extended study on the link between what people do and hat people are. In the first Chapter, Lilly tells about her prays regarding her father: "I had asked God repeatedly to do something about T. Ray. He'd gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something"(Kidd, p.4)