"We don't want to tell you what happens in this book. It is truly a special story and we don't want to spoil it," whispers the blurb on the back of Chris Cleave's Little Bee. The cutesy marketing and the charming cover with its scrolling cursive title is disarming to a fault.
This is not an easy book to read. It's incredibly challenging in terms of the subject. A reviewer from The Washington Post writes that the book "deserves a warning label: "Do not judge this book by its cover. Contents under pressure.""
I also think that the marketing does the book a huge disservice as well. I think it's safe to divulge a few details about the book without "ruining" it. This book is a not a mystery, although a few mysteries are unfolded and examined within the plot.
Two strangers share a horrific encounter on the beach two years prior to the novel's beginning. Little Bee is a teenager running for her life from her village in Nigeria when she runs into Sarah O'Rourke, an editor of a British women's magazine on holiday with her husband.
After the horrific events on the beach, the two women are separated by circumstances but reunite two years later in London.
The novel's chapters alternate narrators, so you read the story from both Little Bee's and Sarah's point of view. I feel like this is Cleave's major strength in story telling. He has a wonderful grasp of the language, and creates strong and separate voices for both Little Bee and Sarah O'Rourke. It's hard not to be moved by Little Bee's will and strength.
The book isn't perfect. I had a few issues with character development as well as the book's ending, but I found it be moving and eye opening, especially on issues of refugees and immigration removal centers in the UK.
Some of my favorite bits:
"The detention officer, the one who was looking at the topless photo in the newspaper--he was a small man and his hair was pale, like the tinned mushroom soup they served us on Tuesdays. His wrists were thin and white like electrical cables covered in plastic. His uniform was bigger than he was. The shoulders of the jacket rose up in two bumps, one on each side of his head, as if he had little animals hiding in there. I thought of those creatures blinking in the light when he took off his jacket in the evening."
"As a girl I liked what all girls like: pink plastic bracelets and later silver ones; a few practice boyfriends and then, in no particular hurry, men. England was made of dawn mists that rose to the horse's shoulder, of cakes cooled on wire trays for the cutting, of soft awakening."
"London was fun. Men blew through like tall ships, some of them already wrecked."
"Tea is the taste of my land: it is bitter and warm, strong, and sharp with memory. It tastes of longing. It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from. Also it vanishes--the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup. It disappears, like plantations stretching up into the mist. I have heard that your country drinks more tea than any other. How sad that must make you--like children who long for absent mothers."
"His suit, too--it was a good one; Kenzo, I think--and it fit him well, but there was something arresting about the way he wore it. He held his arms a little away from his body--as if the suit was the pelt of some suaver animal, recently slain and imperfectly cured, so that the bloody rawness of it made his skin crawl."
"It was the sound of the surf pounding on the beach that woke me. Crash, like the drawer of a cash register springing open and all the coins inside it smashing against the edge of their compartments. The surf pounded and ebbed, the cash drawer opened and closed."
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