Little Bee

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.