The Secret Life of Bees, from book too film

The secret life of Bees is a beautiful, humorous and loving book written by Sue Monk Kidd. The book is about a girl who loses her mom but ends getting more mothers than she could wish for. Through this story we follow a teenager named Lily who goes through many hard times, but while she does she also grows by the help of three wonderful sisters and many other amusing characters.

First, I must say that I loved the movie. It was a great movie and it moved me in almost the same way as the book, but the two are very different. I loved the book, the description and all the moments Lily shared with August, Zack and the other girls, they seem more real in the book. The book is more descriptive, you see more, and you feel more from time to time. In the movie, you are dragged from a feeling of happiness to a feeling of sadness. In the book, there is a subtle change whenever the moods or occasions change. You read and feel everything Lily thinks and feels, it’s almost like the reader and Lily is one person. You get more depth into Lily's thoughts, and all the scenes come together in the end in a big, giant puzzle. Every scene is needed to make a complete characterization of Lily and the other characters. Films can’t do that, not in the same way books can. Books can drag you into the moment, I am sure films can have that effect too, but when words, lines of words do it, it doubles the effect.

The book pictured the characters different than I pictured them. I saw T Ray as a mean beating machine, but in the movie he had more feeling, he seemed more emotional. Not as depicted in the book. Rosaleen did not "clash" with the movie character, they were not the same. I always saw Rosaleen as stubborn and clumsy. The movie version of Rosaleen depicted her as a soft, non strict woman, non clumsy. I must say though, they recreated the characters of May, June and Lily perfectly.

In the movie, scenes are skipped. Important scenes, like all those moments when Lily lies alone on her bed thinking about her mother and hurting over the fact that she now is a run-away. All of those moments when August and Lily have conversations, those conversations taught Lily a lot about life and they helped heal her, heal the wounds T Ray had left. The book is slow and gentle, you may say predictable but it is beautiful and as is the movie, but in a different way. Scenes that are important for understanding Lily and her life get lost or get gathered up in one whole scene.

One thing that I hate that they changed is the ending. Well, I like the fact that they changed Lily’s final question for T Ray. Instead of asking if it really was her, that Lily really killed her mother, she asked if Deborah was intending to take Lily with her when she left. That was a marvelous move. The thing I resented though was the big detail of the “mothers on the porch”. I have pictured what Lily must have seen standing there in the driveway looking up towards the porch and seeing all of her mother’s: Rosaleen, August, June and the fellowship. That was a perfect ending for Lily, she lost one mother and she found so many. In the movie, the mothers are June, August and Rosaleen. This is beautiful too, but what moved me in the book and what I think took Lily’s breath away was the view, the view of all the women standing there. They had hurried to the pink house when they heard Lily was in trouble, they protected her like she was their own child. They stood up for her and they would do anything for her. That feeling, that feeling of love made the story perfect and I missed that in the movie.

The theme in this book, by my opinion, is courage. Courage to hope that something good will come along. Courage to make sure things happen, and hope to stand by your courage. Lily showed courage when she left T Ray, when she left in the hope of a better future someplace else. Rosaleen showed courage when she stood up to those racists on her way to town. Rosaleen hoped and knew that someday things would be different for her and her brothers and sisters. Justice would come to them, and she would fight until that change came. August put hope in Lily by making her realize that the world wasn’t a bad place just because Lily had experienced bad things.

This book is relevant today in so many ways. It shows us that courage to do something about our life can change it. Many children are put in the situation Lily is put in, verbally or physically abused by their parent. So the book can function in a direct way, it can show them, give the children hope that if they just reach out for help their situation can change. Not everybody is bad in this world; there are a lot of good guys too. This is just one of the explanations I have for the books relevance. The other one is more general. People suffer, people face hard times. The book encourages people to look forward, take their minds out of the past and focus on what the future might bring. It is important to search your past, but you have to be ready for what you might find.