Book Review: Little Bee

Book details:
Paperback, 266 pages
Simon & Schuster, inc.

Synopsis:
The publishers of Chris Cleave's new novel "don't want to spoil" the story by revealing too much about it, and there's good reason not to tell too much about the plot's pivot point. All you should know going in to Little Bee is that what happens on the beach is brutal, and that it braids the fates of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan (who calls herself Little Bee) and a well-off British couple--journalists trying to repair their strained marriage with a free holiday--who should have stayed behind their resort's walls. The tide of that event carries Little Bee back to their world, which she claims she couldn't explain to the girls from her village because they'd have no context for its abundance and calm. But she shows us the infinite rifts in a globalized world, where any distance can be crossed in a day--with the right papers--and "no one likes each other, but everyone likes U2." Where you have to give up the safety you'd assumed as your birthright if you decide to save the girl gazing at you through razor wire, left to the wolves of a failing state. --Amazon

My review:
Filled with feminist themes, Little Bee by Chris Cleave is a great summer read. Intense, well-written, gripping...the book will keep you immersed.

Feminist themes include rape/violence against women, racism and immigration.

And lastly, I'll leave you with a sneak peak from the novel:

Understanding. That would have been a good name for my village, even before the men came to burn our huts and drill for oil. It would have been a good name for the clearing around the limba tree...We knew what we had: we had nothing. Your world and our world had come to this understanding. Even the missionaries had boarded up their mission. They left us with the holy books that were not worth the expense of shipping back to your country. In our village our only Bible had all of its pages missing after the forty-sixth verse of the twenty-seventh chapter of Matthew, so that the end of our religion, as far as any of us knew, was "My God, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?" We understood that this was the end of the story.

4 stars.