Little Bee
Ratings22
Average rating3.6
Millions of people have read, discussed, debated, cried, and cheered with Little Bee, a Nigerian refugee girl whose violent and courageous journey puts a stunning face on the worldwide refugee crisis. “Little Bee will blow you away.” —The Washington Post The lives of a sixteen-year-old Nigerian orphan and a well-off British woman collide in this page-turning #1 New York Times bestseller, book club favorite, and “affecting story of human triumph” (The New York Times Book Review) from Chris Cleave, author of Gold and Everyone Brave Is Forgiven. We don’t want to tell you too much about this book. It is a truly special story and we don’t want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this: It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific. The story starts there, but the book doesn’t. And it’s what happens afterward that is most important. Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don’t tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.
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Pretty good but I think the thing that bothered me was that the author started relying so much on Charlie to move the action forward, i.e. need the police to come - have Charlie hide in a drain-pipe...need for Little Bee to be caught have Charlie suddenly break away and run towards her to single her out. There were other instances, so it was just OK for me.
Wow. This sucker grabs you right from the start, doesn't it?
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Finished this relatively quickly, in part because it's a surprisingly good little page-turner, partly because there is a sense of foreboding throughout the whole book (a conceit of the plot and concepts within the book, I think) that I wanted to avoid prolonging. The whole time, Little Bee is waiting for the other shoe to drop, and so is the reader, and it was kind of exhausting. Still, it's an interesting book, full of wonderful turns of phrase and some pretty good insights. There were times when it seemed to veer into the overly-sentimental, but then it would veer right back into bleakly realistic. There were tones of the so-called “magical negro” problem found all over the place in fiction, but these were mitigated by the main thrust of the story for me, which was basically a critique of consumer culture and colonialization. I think.
A really enjoyable read, as I suspect any book that includes a four year old who refuses to wear anything but a Batman costume and to be referred to as Batman might be. I'm going with three stars instead of four because things fell apart for me a little at the end; Cleave's strength is in his mordant observations of the minutiae of modern life, in this case as observed through the very proper English of a Nigerian refugee, and the pace of the last chapter or two leaves no room for the original, completely engaging prose of the rest of the novel. Nonetheless, I'd recommend it to a friend.
