The Secret Life of Bees

Author's Name: Sue Monk Kidd

Although its title suggests a documentary or a scientific study, it is, on the contrary, a literary work par excellence. It delves into the world of Lily, a fourteen-year-old girl who lives with her father on a peach farm near the town of Sylvain. She suffers from his harsh and cruel nature and from punishments that no one else could have invented. Lily also suffers from the absence of her mother, who died when she was four years old. The issue of her death is something everyone avoids discussing, unaware that Lily's memory has never completely recovered from the echo of the gunshot that was fired that day. In fact, that memory haunts her and makes her certain that she is someone unworthy of love. To escape all this, Lily secludes herself, from time to time, to a remote corner of the farm, and rests with some of the things that remain of her mother’s possessions: a pair of white gloves, and two pictures, one of her mother and the other of Black Mary, stuck in a wooden frame with the vague title written behind them: “Tiburon, K.G.” So what is the story behind that title, I wonder?