The Secret Life of Bees Themes

The Reaper is kind of all over this novel. Lily's makes her preoccupation with this topic pretty clear from the get-go, obsessing over her mother's death and her role in it. May, another key charac...

Lily's awareness of injustice and prejudice expands enormously throughout the course of the story. When we first meet her, she seems to have a kind of vague awareness of the kinds of prejudices her...

Oh, Freud, where are you when we need you? Poor Lily is really struggling when her tale begins, primarily because she misses her late mother terribly (and her father . . . well, she just hopes for...

With a narrator who is a champion fibber and a title that includes the word "Secret," you know that secrecy and lying are going to be big topics when you crack this one open. Lying is kind of a dou...

With lots of references to prayer, "signs," and religious idols, the novel puts spiritual life front and center. Early references to traditional churchgoing and religion aren't necessarily super po...

Lily wants to be an author when she grows up—and, boy, does she pick the right place to run away to in terms of finding mentoring—and material. Although initially it's hard to imagine a taller...

We think August would concur with the Beatles in their assertion, "Love is all you need." To be sure, it's all Lily wants at the beginning of the novel, as she's not getting a whole lot. She event...

A lot of the novel's characters experience prisons, some of them literal (in the cases of Zach and Rosaleen), and others metaphorical (as with Lily and Deborah). Zach and Rosaleen run afoul of the...