Sue Monk Kidd: Chapter Analysis

From the first chapter, Sue Monk Kidd makes it clear that she’s writing a novel about the relationships between different kinds of women. Because the protagonist of her book is a young teenager who’s lost her mother, and the majority of the other female characters are adult women, the most important kind of woman-to-woman relationship for the novel is that between the mother and the daughter. Lily travels to Tiburon, South Carolina, in search of information about her dead mother, Deborah, and she also admits to be looking for a maternal figure—a metaphorical mother—to replace Deborah. How does Kidd depict the mother-daughter relationship, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of this relationship?

The first thing we notice about mother-daughter