The Secret Life of Bees Book Review

The Secret Life of Bees Book Review
By: Carly Flowers
The book, The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Mink Kidd, is a novel about a fourteen year old girl, Lily Owens, who accidentally killed her mother when she was just a toddler, and now is stuck with an abusive father and a black, cold-hearted stand-in mother, Rosaleen. When Rosaleen is put in jail for assaulting the most known racists in town, Lily decides to sneak her out and run away to Tiburon, South Carolina, a town which holds the secret to her mother's past. There, she finds refuge with three black beekeeper sisters who graciously take in the two runaways. I highly recommend this fascinating book because it is inspiring, interesting, and it really gets you hooked onto it once you get started.
The Secret Life of Bees is an inspiring book because Lily is so real. She's not one of those characters that you cannot relate to at all, she's one who you can really understand how she's feeling, and what she's thinking. Furthermore, Lily triumphs over huge obstacles in her life, like the fact that she killed her own mother lingering in her head all day. She overcomes that when she goes a little crazy in the honey house. When she gets so angry she throws jars of honey at the wall, you understand why she's so mad, and why she has to take her anger out somewhere, and that's how she decided to do it. Also, the author did a fantastic job explaining how everything happened, “I picked up one of the jars of honey and hurled it as hard as I could. I stood in a gooey room full of broken glass, and I didn't care. My mother had left mer. Who cared about honey on the walls?” You understand why she needed to throw the honey, even though the book never says why. Even though she's had a horrible past, she still lives the rest of her life to the fullest, and overcomes her past.
I thought the book was really good because of its point of view. The whole book was in Lily's perspective, and because Sue Monk Kidd wrote it that way, it was really interesting because she explained how Lily was feeling the whole time. Everything Lily took from anything anyone said, was stated in the book. It was really fascinating to see how she interpreted things and how she expressed her feeling.
Once you get started on this book, you can't really stop. At least, for me, it was somewhat impossible. When I got past page forty, I was hooked. Everything was so intriguing, it's hard to stop.
Like I said before, Lily is a very interesting character, but there are more interesting characters, other than Lily. Like May, for instance. May is one of the beekeeping sisters, but May's a little different. When May's twin sister died, a part of May died, too. Whenever May heard something sad, or disturbing, or hard for someone to endure, May would break down like she was going through that, too. I thought that was really interesting for the author to put in there, it was something you didn't really expect from a book like this.
In conclusion, the book The Secret Life of Bees is a riveting book that is great for all ages. It is interesting, intriguing, inspiring, and it's really hard to put down! It's a really great book and I really liked reading it.