Review: Little Bee

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



The book cover to Little Bee says that this is a special story and that one shouldn’t talk too much about what happens in it or the tale will be spoilt. This is true. But I will tell you one thing about the book: Little Bee is a story about death. Make no mistake about that.

Thirty-one pages of celebrity goings-on about town, and one page of news from the world which existed beyond London’s orbital motorway—the paper offered it up as a sort of memento mori.

This memento mori novel is couched in the guise of a tale about immigration, British politics, and human weaknesses.

Tea is the taste of my land: it is bitter and warm, strong, and sharp with memory. It tastes of longing. It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from. Also it vanishes—the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup. It disappears, like plantations stretching up into the mist. I have heard that your country drinks more tea than any other. How sad that must make you—like children who long for absent mothers. I am sorry.

But the real story behind all that is about the most human weakness of all—death. Emotional death, mental death, and physical death…all one.

Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn’t the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves…

It is also about moving on from that death, and finding out if that is the best action to take, or even if it is possible anymore.

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.

And if at times the author, being a man, writes his women characters as too reactive, simple, without carefully but quickly running all options through their heads (in other words, mannish), we can of course forgive him since he has brought forth a wondrous story with awefilled thoughts, and a wonderful sense of humor that will not be quenched, even after the hardest hardships.

“Darlin,” she said. “Life did take its gifts back from yu and me in de diffren order, dat’s all. Truth to tell, funny is all me got lef wid…”

This book is not for everyone. It forces you to look deep into the eyes of death and into your own eyes, and to see what the difference is between them. It is a book to be read carefully and slowly, perhaps many times, with honesty. Can humanity prevail over death? This shining jewel of a tale confronts us with the facts and leaves us to decide our answer and what we will do with it.

“It’s easier when you are from outside.”

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