The Secret Life of Bees | Summary
Chapter 1
Lily Owens remembers the summer of 1964, when she turned fourteen years old. She begins by describing the way she would wait in her bedroom each night for the arrival of bees. Though these bees are imagined, Lily's emotional attachment to them makes the reader wonder if they might be real. Lily's caretaker, Rosaleen, has told her that bees swarming are an omen of death. Lily is preoccupied with death, since her mother, Deborah, died when Lily was four. She thinks often of the day her mother died and shares the incident, as well as her own guilt, with the...
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