Little Bee
By Chris Cleave
Library (Audio/Book)
Rating: 7 of 10

I forgot to bring a novel to read while on vacation so I went to the local bookstore and wandered around.  I came out with Little Bee by Chris Cleave.  I’d never heard of the book or the author but the endorsements on the front sold me on the book: “Little Bee will blow you away” (Washington Post) and “Immensely readable and moving…An affecting story of human triumph” (The New York Times Book Review).  Sounded like the kind of beach reading I was looking for.

Little Bee didn’t disappoint.  The basic storyline is about a Nigerian teenager seeking political asylum in the UK (United Kingdom).  Not the kind of narrative that would have grabbed my attention, but one that shows that a well told story no matter what the content is worth listening to.

The narrative goes back and forth between Little Bee’s voice, the young girl from Nigeria, and the mother of the family who is trying to help her.  There are a lot of great one-liners in this book.  Perhaps my favorite is, “No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.”  Little Bee makes this quip after pointing out that people in her village listen to U2 as did the policemen in the detention center where she was held for two years after being caught as a stowaway on a freighter.  She wonders if the rebels in her country and the government soldiers who are fighting one another in Nigeria listen to U2 too.  She adds, “I think everyone was killing everyone else and listening to the same music.”  I’m not sure if this is a compliment of U2 or a slam.

Little Bee does put a very human face on the issue of immigration.  I have not spent much time pondering this issue, but this book makes me wonder more about how the political asylum process works.  In an interview with Cleave that is added to the end of the book, he tells the story of an Angolan father and his son who inspired part of the story.  After four years of waiting for his application for political asylum, he and his son were rounded up in a surprise raid.  On the night before they would be deported and would inevitably meet persecution and murder back in Angola, the father took his own life.  Cleave says, “What had happened was that Manuel Bravo, aware of a rule under which unaccompanied minors cannot be deported from the UK, had taken his own life in order to save the life of his son.  His last words to his child were: ‘Be brave.  Work hard.  Do well at school.’”  I felt like someone had just hit me in the gut.  Is there a better way?  I don’t know.

Whatever you think about immigration, Cleave has written a story that will make you laugh and cry and come back for more.  I was sad when the book was over.  I wanted another two or three-hundred pages of Little Bee.

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