Genre: Fiction
We don’t want to tell you WHAT HAPPENS in this book. It is a truly SPECIAL STORY and we don’t want to spoil it. NEVERTHELESS, you need to know enough to buy it, so we will just say this:
This is the story of two women. Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice, the kind of choice we hope you never have to face. Two years later, they meet again—the story starts there…
Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, please don’t tell them what happens. The magic is in how the story unfolds. – Simon & Schuster
Photo courtesy of BN.com
I have mixed emotions about Little Bee. It starts off really strong, then kind of winds down to an ending which leaves me wanting. I hate when a book builds to a climax only to finish with an open ending. If that makes sense. There’s no real resolution to the issues brought up throughout the tale. Of course, the blurb on the inside jacket of Little Bee tells you absolutely nothing of what the story is entails and asks that once you read it to keep your knowledge of what happens to yourself. Well, I think that’s one of the best marketing ploys to get more readers I’ve ever seen. It’s part of the reason I picked up the book to begin with. I wanted to know what the life changing story was. But truth be told, it’s not a life changing story for me. It’s one I’ve heard before (pitifully sad), though it does bring issues swept under the rug back to light.
So in order not to spoil it for you, I’ll merely say the story revolves around Little Bee (which is not her real name) and Sarah—two women who have met one another at an interesting point in their lives. What’s interesting is they were both running away from something. Little Bee is running from the horrors of her Nigerian village and Sarah is running away from the disaster which is her unfulfilled life and marriage. Typical subjects to be addressed, but what’s not so typical are the circumstances under which these two women meet and how it brings them together almost two years later.
Now, while I really dove into the book right away, I didn’t relate to either of the main characters. It may have something to do with the fact that the author is male and writing from a woman’s perspective. That’s not to say it isn’t possible for a male author to supply a convincing female voice; but in this case, Chris Cleave falls a little short. I could associate with their feelings or sympathize with their situations, but I wasn’t able to see myself in either of them. Granted, I felt closer to Sarah than Little Bee. Our lives are almost entirely similar except we’ve made different decisions. (You won’t believe the asinine things she does.) And she has a job, whereas I don’t. Anyway, I truly sympathize with Little Bee but once she reveals a secret to Sarah’s “friend” Lawrence (do note the quotes because that’s a hint) about events surrounding Sarah’s husband Andrew, I don’t feel as kindly toward Little Bee. She turns out to be someone I didn’t think she could be and I find it strange to do a 180° like that where the protagonist is concerned. I wanted to continue feeling sorry for her, but I began to think she was a selfish teenager who still knows nothing of the world. Maybe that was the point?
At any rate, I liked the book, but I didn’t love it and I definitely won’t be reading it again. I think it’s missing a few key things, like a resolution to the plot and characters I could sink my teeth into. It’s not so much that they are two dimensional, but the believability of the situations they end up in is just unrealistic. Sarah is an editor of a magazine she started as a young woman and ends up making the most asinine decisions a mother could make. I’m left wondering so much that it takes away from my enjoyment of the ending, which isn’t much of an ending. It’s not happy, it’s not sad; it just is.
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