nocautepropaganda

This was a good book. It's not without its flaws, but it kept me engaged and made me care about its characters enough that I cringed at some of the things that happened to them -- not least because those events are representations of the horrible things people do to each other in real life. The story has two first-person protagonists, Little Bee and Sarah, who alternate chapters. Little Bee is a sixteen-year-old girl from Nigeria who is trying to find asylum in England. After two years in a detention centre, she is finally released, and goes to find the only people she knows in England: Sarah and her husband, a white couple whom she met during an incident on a beach in Nigeria. I almost called it "a tragic incident", but frankly, "tragic" doesn't feel like a strong enough word. Exactly what happened in a mystery for the first half of the book, but is revealed soon enough that I didn't get frustrated waiting to find out what had happened, and why Little Bee and Sarah feel so connected. On the plus side, Little Bee and Sarah are both believable characters with distinct voices. The choices each makes feel well-motivated and understandable (even when they're not the best choices), and Chris Cleave manages to make their voices very different without resorting to deeply dialectic speech for Little Bee. It's never hard to tell whose chapter you're reading, and both characters read as well-rounded and real. (There is some dialectic speech used earlier in the novel for a Jamaican woman named Yevette, who gets out of the detention centre at the same time as Little Bee. Usually this bothers me, but her character is treated like a human being, not a stereotype, so in this case I was able to accept it.) The story itself drew me in and kept me wanting to know how it would turn it. It's a difficult read at times because of what Little Bee, in particular, goes through, but it flows along so smoothly, it can be hard to put down. On the negative side, the language was too flowery for my taste at times, to the point that certain heavy-handed metaphors distracted me from the narrative. This was especially true when they were drawn out for a long time, or revisited throughout the book. As well, while I thought the book ended believably, I did have some trouble suspending my disbelief for how we got there. The scene on the South Bank towards the end of the book, where Little Bee's life changes drastically once again, felt like too much of an author's construct to get where he wanted to go. I believe in the level of racism that Cleave portrays in the book -- much as I wish that I didn't -- but the police officer in that scene felt to me like he bordered on psychic; and Little Bee's reaction to him felt somewhat out of character. Nevertheless, I would recommend this book pretty easily, with the caveat that it goes to some very dark (but, unfortunately, very real) places. If you can handle that, it's well worth reading.

2023-02-08 21:19