The ending of the Secret Life of Bees

I just finished The Secret Life of Bees and the ending surprised me. Lily has gone though a lot, from discovering whom her mother was to discovering who she was. During the book Lily grows up immensely, she has new issues to face and copes with them well. All the challenges of living with her father and running away from the police feel like nothing compared to the anguish of the truth. The truth is very hard to handle but I feel like Lily delt with it wonderfully. I was shocked to find out the connections between all the characters of the book. I would have never thought about how they were all connected before the author explained it. I have come to realize that the bees stand for a lot of things. They can stand for love and how there is so much love in the world but you just have to find it and treat it carefully and lovingly for it to care for you back, like Lily and her bees. She must give them love so they don’t harm her. The bees can also symbolize how Lily feels. She is lost without her mother, like how a colony of bees feel like when the queen bee dies. Lily does not know how to act or live until she meets August and realizes that she has many “queen bees” or mothers. I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone. It was a book everyone could enjoy.