Little Bee

Locations
Call Number: Adult Book / Fiction / General / Cleave, Chris
On Shelf At: Malletts Creek Branch, Traverwood Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Cleave, Chris	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Cleave, Chris	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"Originally published in Great Britain in 2008 by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton."

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Library Journal Review
Summary / Annotation
Fiction Profile
Excerpt
Author Notes
Booklist Review
Publishers Weekly Review

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Best First Three Pages Ever submitted by Sara W on June 20, 2011, 8:44pm The first three pages of this book deserve 5 stars. Absolutely. Little Bee is an excellent narrator and they were positively engaging/hilarious/touching/curiosity-inducing.

After that, the story gets pretty heavy. That's not a problem, but it struck me as a uncomfortably incongruous with the cutesy publisher's note on the front book jacket flap. It's got a coy little tone with some stylized all-caps, teasing about spoiling for the story for us, the readers, who are about to go on a magnificent adventure, within these very pages!

The characters are well-drawn, complex and flawed; and the plot is simple but anchored in questions of morals versus convenience, courage versus fear, first world questions versus third world realities, childhood versus adulthood, true identity versus concealing aliases.

I moved through it pretty quickly, as the characters constantly mention situations before the reader learns about them, I would rush ahead impatient to understand the back story. There are no pleasant back stories. It all works though, as does the convention of alternating narrators between Sarah Summers-O'Rourke and Little Bee. Little Bee had such a precise voice, such perfect phrasing, such a frank way of speaking.

I was also a pretty big fan of Cleave's pitch-perfect Jamaican accent for Yevette.

An interesting read, definitely an excellent way of juxtaposing two cultures and examining the limbo between survival and legality. If you aren't interested in the weight of this story, at least read the first two pages when you are browsing in the bookstore or the library. Just don't expect the book to go on in that vein.

Great book submitted by ashflowtuff on August 14, 2011, 8:16pm I loved this novel. It was a compelling and suspenseful story. Highly recommended.

Amazing story, that kept me coming back submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on July 8, 2014, 8:14am This book surprised me over and over and over again.

The blurb on the back cover says, "We don't want to tell you what happens in this book. It is truly a 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...."

Well, it goes on just a bit more. But they're right. I don't want to tell you anything about what happens. But the story is amazing, and the writing kept me coming back.

Writing like this (p.9), told by a 16 year old Nigerian refugee: "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."

Or this (p.211): "We (my sister and I) were already too old for the game and both of us knew it, but we agreed to dream our dream one last time so that we could fix it into our memories, before we awoke from it forever."

The women tell the story of a dream, realized, broken, hoped for, worked for. Definitely for your to-read list.

Great Book, Wonderful Storytelling submitted by jdybs on August 1, 2016, 2:57pm The narrative is really engaging. Storytelling switches back and forth between the two main women characters but is easy to follow.

While the plot is engaging, the story presents a lot of heavy cultural, and political issues. On one hand, it is an easy, engaging read in that it is a page-turner but it can also be heavy and leave you thinking about the issues it presents for a long while after.

I will definitely recommend it to friends and family as a way of framing and humanizing world issues and dilemmas.

Little bees submitted by angie. on July 21, 2021, 7:50pm Great book! Loved it a lot, really interesting!

What a twist submitted by laurenmccarthya2 on July 9, 2023, 1:11pm I think that the cover did the story a disservice. The issues covered in the novel are deep and well-presented. I really didn't expect it to go in the direction it did, and was so glad to have randomly picked up the book from the shelf.