Sarah Summers is enjoying a holiday on a Nigerian beach when a young girl named Little Bee crashes irrevocably into her life. All it takes is a brief and horrifying moment of crisis — a terrifying scene that no reader will forget. Afterwards, Sarah and Little Bee might expect never to see each other again. But Little Bee finds Sarah’s husband’s wallet in the sand, and smuggles herself on board a cargo vessel with his address in mind. She spends two years in detention in England before making her way to Sarah’s house, with what will prove to be devastating timing.
Chapter by chapter, alternating between Little Bee’s voice and Sarah’s, Chris Cleavewholly and caringly portrays two very different women trying to cope with events they’d never imagined. Little Bee is experiencing all the fullness and emptiness of the rich world for the first time, and her observations are hopeful, charming and piercing: “Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl,” she says: “Everyone would be pleased to see me coming.”
Sarah is more cynical and disheartened, a successful magazine editor trying to find meaning in the face of turmoil at home and work. As the story develops, however, we learn about what matters most to her, including her fierce, protective love for her funny little son (“From the Spring of 2007 until the end of that long summer when Little Bee came to live with us,” Sarah says, “my son removed his Batman costume only at bathtimes.”). Sarah is trying to find herself as much as Little Bee is — and, unexpectedly, each character discovers a ray of hope in the other.
What follows when Little Bee comes back into Sarah’s life is a powerful story of reconciliation and healing, but it is mixed in with a generous helping of satire about the daily difficulties of modern life. This is a novel about important issues, from refugee policy to the devastating effects of violence, but more than that, it does something only great fiction can: Little Beeteaches us what it is like to live through experiences most of us think of only as far off disasters in the news.
As ever, the author says it best: “It’s an uplifting, thrilling, universal human story, and I just worked to keep it simple. One brave African girl; one brave Western woman. What if one just turned up on the other’s doorstep one misty morning and asked, Can you help? And what if that help wasn’t just a one-way street?”
If you're picking up this book to read about Little Bee, the Nigerian refugee, then don't bother. It's not about her at all, but about the white British woman, Sarah. It's about her angst, her family drama, her need to become the said white savior, how Little Bee affects her life, and it's about her need to start off every bit of dialogue with "Oh Bee!" "Oh Laurence!" "Oh Charlie!".
Book content warnings: suicide
I only continued reading this novel because a friend recommended it so highly, because as a survivor and a depressed person with suicidal thoughts, the beginning half of this book was very difficult to get through, as there was a suicide almost every single chapter. I'm not kidding. I mean, I'm glad the author said "It was depression that killed ___" instead of some ableist phrasing, but it's still not a fun ride when you fight these thoughts yourself.
OK. So I'm always wary of white dudes writing POVs of black girls/women, obviously, but this book came with so much hype. And let me down so hard. It has nothing to do with Little Bee or how she feels or how anything affects her. Everything is about the white people, how what happened on the beach (a very important plot point) affected them, etc. At one point Sarah says, "We need to talk about [what happened at the beach]," because she wants to know to ease her own heart and guilt. Because who cares about Little Bee or her probably ptsd and everything.
There's also a dash of sexism, heteronormativity, and explicit ableism (i.e. "'He was a twat, really, only you couldn't say that because he was blind. I suppose that's how he got so far. [. . .] He used to lean, like this, and his hand would sort of tremble. I think it was an act. He didn't tremble when he was reading Braille.'"
Even if I ignored everything above, the purple-ish writing quickly becomes stale, the white characters are unbearable to read, and the entire book feels like some sort of lecture.
