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mike_morse 's review for:
Little Bee
by Chris Cleave
This is a horrifying book, so know that before you start. Personally, I think maybe I should have read it at a different time of my life (I'm sending that Holocaust movie back to Netflix unseen!). Still, there's no denying its power. I suppose you have to be a great writer to write a really horrifying book.
There are no heroes in this book. All the characters are maddeningly and tragically human. Sarah, in particular seems unrealistically weak at times, considering her strength at others. The characters are put in extraordinary situations, and they act like, sadly, you or I would.
I will digress here: A long time ago there was a magazine called Co-Evolution that grew out of The Whole Earth Catalog, a distinctly 60's book that was practically our bible at the time. There was a story in Co-Evolution written by a man who worked at Mother Teresa's hospice in Calcutta. He said that what struck him most about his experience is how human beings are so relative in their outlook on life. He said they would take a beggar, filthy, with almost no clothes living in the gutter, his body racked with tuberculosis. They would take him into hospice, feed him, treat him and give him clean clothes. And then, the author said, within a couple of weeks, the previous desperate beggar would be complaining that his new shirt has a small hole in it.
In a way, I think this is one of the major themes of this book. It is the story of a poor Nigerian teenager running away from horror in her country, and a well-off English magazine editor with a small son grappling with an ill-conceived marriage. By pure chance their lives become deeply entwined. They each try to save the other, but their values remain fixed in the mind-set of their own village. For each, a set-back or a tragedy is defined from their set point of reference. It's not so much that the characters see this, but that we do. How can we reconcile Sarah worrying about her son's day care situation, when we know what Little Bee has seen? But we do it every day, we just don't see it up close as Sarah has. How can we worry so deeply about our own petty issues, and forget what thousands of "Little Bees" have experienced?
My only quibble with the book is that the son's "dialect" (I don't know what else to call it), is very strange. The language mistakes he makes just don't seem to me to be the kind of mistakes that children make. It's just a small distraction in an otherwise finely-crafted, if painful to read, book.
There are no heroes in this book. All the characters are maddeningly and tragically human. Sarah, in particular seems unrealistically weak at times, considering her strength at others. The characters are put in extraordinary situations, and they act like, sadly, you or I would.
I will digress here: A long time ago there was a magazine called Co-Evolution that grew out of The Whole Earth Catalog, a distinctly 60's book that was practically our bible at the time. There was a story in Co-Evolution written by a man who worked at Mother Teresa's hospice in Calcutta. He said that what struck him most about his experience is how human beings are so relative in their outlook on life. He said they would take a beggar, filthy, with almost no clothes living in the gutter, his body racked with tuberculosis. They would take him into hospice, feed him, treat him and give him clean clothes. And then, the author said, within a couple of weeks, the previous desperate beggar would be complaining that his new shirt has a small hole in it.
In a way, I think this is one of the major themes of this book. It is the story of a poor Nigerian teenager running away from horror in her country, and a well-off English magazine editor with a small son grappling with an ill-conceived marriage. By pure chance their lives become deeply entwined. They each try to save the other, but their values remain fixed in the mind-set of their own village. For each, a set-back or a tragedy is defined from their set point of reference. It's not so much that the characters see this, but that we do. How can we reconcile Sarah worrying about her son's day care situation, when we know what Little Bee has seen? But we do it every day, we just don't see it up close as Sarah has. How can we worry so deeply about our own petty issues, and forget what thousands of "Little Bees" have experienced?
My only quibble with the book is that the son's "dialect" (I don't know what else to call it), is very strange. The language mistakes he makes just don't seem to me to be the kind of mistakes that children make. It's just a small distraction in an otherwise finely-crafted, if painful to read, book.