Summer Reading: Little Bee

Little Bee by Chris Cleave is a book that I desperately wanted to love (there is so much hype surrounding it and the topic is particularly salient at the moment) but, while I did love many parts, the story left me feeling flat at the end. Little Bee is a 16-year-old Nigerian refugee who has seen her entire village, including her family, brutally murdered and is seeking asylum in the UK. Sarah is a 30-something suburbanite mother who runs her own fashion magazine but feels like she is losing her journalistic integrity and that her marriage is in shambles. The lives of these protagonists converge for a brief moment under horrific circumstances on a beach in Nigeria and the story begins two years later when Little Bee seeks Sarah out to help her (with flashbacks that reference the events many, many times before revealing them). The narrative alternates between the two women but I enjoyed Little Bee's perspective much more than Sarah's. I found Little Bee to be incredibly sympathetic and her voice made me think differently about the refugees around the world. I had tears in my eyes every time she would search for a way to kill herself in a new environment just in case the bad men found her and I laughed as she thought of ways to describe first world problems to the imaginary girls back in her village. I found Sarah to be less likable because her behavior seems so random.  I could never figure out her motivation for anything (I think her affair with Lawrence would have made more sense if it had begun after the events on the beach), including her reason for helping Little Bee, and she wasn't entirely believable to me, especially in her interactions with her son Charlie (who refuses to wear anything other than his Batman costume). I am not sure how I feel about the ending because it seems rather ambiguous, as if Cleave's message is that there is nothing anyone can do to help refugees. I don't want to believe that! I liked this book (I would have liked it better had it been from Little Bee's perspective only) but I didn't love it and I certainly don't think it lives up to the blurb on the cover (a cryptic message that the book is so good that the publishers can't give away any of the details).

Note:  I do, however, still want to read Cleave's latest book Everyone Brave Is Forgiven.