Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Chris Cleave

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

266 pages, published February 16, 2010

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Little Bee follows the stories of two very different women.  Little Bee is the name of a teenage girl from Nigeria who manages to sneak her way into England only to be discovered thrown into an asylum detention centre for several years.  Sarah O’Rourke is a magazine editor from Surrey with a young son and a troubled marriage.  When the lives of the two women intersect both in Nigeria and the UK both of their lives are dramatically altered.   

Quotes

“On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”

 

“I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us. ”

 

“I’m telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.”

 

“Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.”

 

“Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.”

 

“To be well in your mind you have first to be free.”

 

“Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.”

 

“Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.”

 

“There was no quick grief for Andrew because he had been so slowly lost. First from my heart, then from my mind, and only finally from my life.”

 

“This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.”

 

“I planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth).”

 

“There’s eight million people here pretending the others aren’t getting on their nerves. I believe it’s called civilization.”

 

“People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.”

 

“What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream of things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.”

My Take

Little Bee was an enjoyable read and opened my eyes to the plight of African refugees.  The author’s contrast of the lives of two women:  teenage “Little Bee,” an illegal refugee from Nigeria, and 30-something Sarah O’Rourke, successful magazine editor with a young son and unhappy marriage, and how they impact each other held my attention and deepened my interest in their stories.  Not the best book I’ve read this year, but certainly not the worst.