The secret life of bees movie summary. The Secret Life of Bees (novel) 2019-02-03

The Secret Life of Bees Chapters 7 and 8 Summary and Analysis

She writes an acrostic about how much of a horrible father he is. Ray comes to the Boatwrights' looking for Lily. This lack of empowerment clashes with the general growth Lily has experienced throughout the book. The film is noted for 's critically acclaimed performance as August Boatwright. Just as the bees are allowed to keep their secrets, August, suggests, August is giving Lily her support even if she wants to keep her secret for a little while longer.

The Secret Life of Bees Chapter 1 Summary

August decides that Rosaleen will help her sister May Boatwright around the house and Lily will learn beekeeping. During the day I heard them tunneling through the walls of my bedroom, sounding like a radio tuned to static in the next room, and I imagined them in there turning the walls into honeycombs, with honey seeping out for me to taste. He went storming out into the orchard to get her. But when she calls him, she discovers that her world is not going to be like the photograph of the happy family. The Secret Life of Bees is the story of Lily Owens, a girl who has shaped her life around one devastating memory—the afternoon her mother was killed, when Lily was four. She asks Lily how long she was on the grits. She is fourteen years old, and she lives in Sylvan, South Carolina, with her abusive father, T.

SparkNotes: The Secret Life of Bees: Plot Overview

There in a store they find a honey jar with the same picture of the Virgin Mary as was on the slab of wood that Lily retained. In a flashback, readers learn that T. In the South, blacks were bullied and in some cases murdered for exercising their new freedoms. She becomes convinced that it means her mother once lived in the Boatwright house. They visit him, but they have to be patient until returns to his office.

The Secret Life of Bees Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis from LitCharts

Lonely and unhappy, struggling thorugh a troubled relationship with her father, Lily runs away to live with Rosaleen Daise, her balck former caregive and only friend. Ray picks up Lily at the police station, and the two of them get into a fight. Her thoughts about the Father's Day card make her see that no matter what she does to make him pay attention or love her, he won't, which is why she tears up the letter. August studied at a black college in Maryland and then worked as a housekeeper. In the first scene, a woman in a dress wanders around a room and goes back and forth in a closet.

SparkNotes: The Secret Life of Bees: Plot Overview

During the harvest, the bees flood around Lily, and she loses herself in thought about her mother. The other women find her dead in the river, having killed herself. The Boatwright house decides not to tell May in fear of an unbearable emotional episode. We never learn what happened to the boy who actually threw the bottle. Going into the pink house, she finds May on the ground with marshmallows and graham crackers, a technique her mother also used for getting rid of roaches.

The Secret Life of Bees Chapter 1 Summary

Apparently, on the night of July 1st of that year, she was laying in bed and a swarm of bees decided to have a party in her room. May taunts August and Lily, and eventually they join in the games. Lily finds Rosaleen at the hospital, where Rosaleen has been taken after being beaten up by the arresting police officers. Lily realizes that, despite what she feels personally, she remains a member of a greater, flawed society. Tiburon celebrates Willifred one day each year. Hurriedly, she takes off the gloves and slips the items back into the box and starts to bury it. Then Lily begins to consider how humans can learn from nature.

The Secret Life of Bees by by Sue Monk Kidd: Summary and reviews

August explains that each of the Boatwright sisters has her own special month corresponding to her name. Living with her are her two sisters: June , a classical cellist and civil rights activist, and May , who you don't want to startle with anything sad. When Lily returns home, Clayton, the lawyer, has arrived to tell the Boatwrights that Zach has been arrested. To escape her lonely life and troubled relationship with her father T-Ray, Lily flees with Rosaleen, her caregiver and friend, to a South Carolina town that holds the secret to her mother's past. The queen in the hive, however, is a mother to thousands.

The Secret Life of Bees Summary

He doesn't know the simplest things about her. If ever there was a woman born to be christened Queen, she's the one. August explains that she read about Black Madonnas in school and learned they aren't unusual in Europe. She was all I wanted and I took her away. The bees came the summer of 1964, the summer I turned fourteen and my life went spinning off into a whole new orbit, and I mean whole new orbit.

Chapter 8

Like Rosaleen, Zach is immediately taken to prison, with no attempts on the part of the police to uncover the truth. Lily never considered the possibility that a woman could be so strong. They land on August's doorstep. August has been waiting patiently for Lily to tell the truth. August also tells Lily that bees have a secret life that people cannot understand, and Lily likes the idea that they have a secret life like she does.

The Secret Life of Bees Summary

August and Lily spend a day pasting labels onto honey jars. Lily and Zach are going to spend one morning harvesting honey at a farmhouse in the country. On one outing to put honey jars in an office, Zach runs into his friend and two other boys. Clayton Forrest gives his assurance that Lily and Rosaleen are not getting charged with any crimes back in Sylvan. Lily asks August about all of the details of her life. Looking at the photo, she believes she is looking at a father who loves his daughter; she muses that he probably even knows what her favorite color is.