Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was admittedly drawn in by the jacket cover of the novel "Little Bee" by Chris Cleave, where a simple sales pitch was made: "We don't want to tell you too much about this book. It is truly special story and we don't want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something , so we will just say this: This is the story of two women. Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice. Two years later, they meet again. The story starts there. Once you have read it you'll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens. The magic is in how it unfolds." These publishers knew what they were doing, as it is unlikely that I am the only person who purchased this novel because of the lure of this mysterious description. Unfortunately, the novel fell short of being at all special or magical. In fact, upon discovery of the true subject of this novel, I now reflect and find this description to be incredibly insensitive to the issues relevant to oil and conflict, and those of asylum seeking refugees. It is a mockery made of the stories of the 42 million refugees and internally displaced people living across the globe. This, however, is not the least of Chris Cleave's problems contained within the pages of his novel. Cleave is very strategic in the initial 100 pages of his novel. He repeatedly refers to a life-changing event, one that each character can neither forget nor recover from, but does not disclose any details of the actual event; only that it took place on a beach in Nigeria. Because of the reader's eagerness to discover what it was that happened on the beach, and how it was that these characters became connected, his poor writing style and weak character development goes largely unnoticed. It is once the beach scene is revealed, and the pages are turned a little slower, that one can begin to dissect Cleave's poor narrative. His characters are absolutely inconsistent and unbelievable, with no exceptions. At times, Cleave portrays Little Bee as a confused Nigerian village girl who knows not of Western technology, and then later she is a young girl in Nigeria dreaming of refrigerators and washing machines. In one chapter, Little Bee, never having seen a telephone before - and in fact at one point making conjectures as to how "voice transmission" between people works - is able to almost effortlessly delete a contact number on Sarah's cell phone when the phone is placed in her hand. Later however, she describes getting on a train for the first time and figuring out where to sit to be a difficult task. At times her transition into life in the UK is made to seem easy, which is another item with which I take great issue. Cleave has clearly not done his research on the settlement and immigration experience. The character description of Sarah is similarly conflicting and uneven in a number of respects. For example, Cleave contradicts himself often when describing her feelings for her husband versus her lover. On one page, she says there was a time her husband Andrew could make her "forget one third of the earth" as the ocean goes unnoticed on their honeymoon. Then on another page, she says that she feels for Lawrence in a way that she has never before felt for Andrew and suggests that there was never any love between her and her husband. Similarly, she invites, or rather insists, that Little Bee stay with her but Little Bee hesitates. Then a few pages later, when Little Bee accepts Sarah's offer and suggests moving in with her, she is taken aback, and it is as though this suggestion comes as a surprise. Cleave's development of each character and of the plot is just plain weak. As the novel carries on, the dialogue becomes worse and worse, and it seems that Cleave does not know where to end this story (though in my opinion, it should have ended much sooner than it did). I have not and will not be recommending this book to anyone and it is incredibly disappointing that the book critics of today are hailing this piece of "literature" and comparing the author to the likes of Ian McEwan and Khaled Hosseini.