Yay or Nay? 
Yay2! (81%)
Yay2! (81%)
Consensus: A book full of both beauty & ugliness that is hard to remain ambivalent about. Fortunately, more people seem to like it than dislike it.
Description: We don’t want to tell you too much about this book.
It is a truly special story and we don’t want to spoil it.
Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say … [more]
16 Book Reviews for “Little Bee: A Novel” by Chris Cleave
- Cleave is brave to give the struggles of an instantly sympathetic African refugee equal weight with the worries of an adulterous, angst-ridden suburbanite who will not immediately endear herself to readers. Their crossed paths and budding friendship, along with some rather extraordinary dilemmas that result, ring true, though. But what elevates this novel even further is Cleave’s forceful call for all of us, the floating masses of a globalized, socially isolating modern world, to look after one other.
Published the 12th day of February, 2009 in The Seattle Times | Reviewed by Tyrone Beason | Full Review
- Novelist Cleave does a brilliant job of making both characters not only believable but memorable. Their narration is achingly real, filled with insights and candor. These compelling voices grip the reader’s heart and do not let go even after the book’s hyper-tense final page. “Little Bee” is a harrowing and heartening marvel of a novel.
Published the 26th day of February, 2009 in Seattle Post-Intelligencer | Reviewed by John Marshall | Full Review
- “Little Bee” deserves a warning label: “Do not judge this book by its cover. Contents under pressure”…. “Little Be” will blow you away. “Little Bee” leaves little doubt that Cleave deserves the praise. He has carved two indelible characters whose choices in even the most straitened circumstances permit them dignity – if they are willing to sacrifice for it. “Little Bee” is the best kind of political novel: You’re almost entirely unaware of its politics because the book doesn’t deal in abstractions but in human beings.
Published the 25th day of February, 2009 in The Washington Post | Reviewed by Sarah L. Courteau | Full Review
- Every once in a while you encounter a book that makes you feel like you’ve fallen down an elevator shaft into a different universe, one you couldn’t extricate yourself from even if you wanted to. The author has kidnapped you through some combination of originality, completeness of vision and sheer brilliance…. This novel takes as its starting point unspeakable violence, but … it is accessible and humane, rich and rewarding. The plotting is masterful, the characters unforgettable. And while it is utterly topical, it turns on timeless questions of freedom, guilt and responsibility and, finally, what it means to be human.
- The problem is the narrators, and the speed with which events unfurl. At times, both voices ring true…. But two consistent problems recur: Cleave gets too caught up in creating voices, and he rushes the pace with which the story occurs…. Instead of allowing his characters time to process the already heavy events that spur the novel’s start, Cleave inundates them with new happenings, and rushes the plot along. The effect is too fast, too easy and too plain. What could have been heartrending dilemmas feel like foregone conclusions instead. In telling a story about the permeability of borders, both emotional and real, Cleave pushes his own boundaries maybe further than they were meant to go. There are stories out there that demand to be told, but an author has to know whether he’s the one that should do the telling.
Published the ath day of Some Month, h 15, 200 in San Francisco Chronicle | Reviewed by Margot Kaminski | Full Review
- He reminds us that many lives have been lost in pursuit of oil. Through a suspenseful narrative, Cleave makes the case that free people have a responsibility to the oppressed. We’ve been globilized, after all.
Published the 15th day of March, 2009 in The Providence Journal | Reviewed by Mandy Twaddell | Full Review
- Cleave paces the story beautifully, lacing it with wit, compassion, and, even at the darkest moments, a searing ray of hope.
Published the 30th day of March, 2009 in The Boston Globe | Reviewed by Karen Campbell | Full Review
- While the pretext of “Little Bee” initially seems contrived… its impact is hardly shallow. Rather than focusing on postcolonial guilt or African angst, Cleave uses his emotionally charged narrative to challenge his readers’ conceptions of civility, of ethical choice…. the character and voice of “Little Bee” reveal Cleave at his finest.
Published the 15th day of May, 2009 in The New York Times | Reviewed by Caroline Elkins | Full Review
- The Other Hand is an ambitious and fearless gallop from the jungles of Africa via a shocking encounter on a Nigerian beach to the media offices of London and domesticity in leafy suburbia. Part-thriller, part-multicultural Aga saga, the book enmeshes its characters in the issues of immigration, globalisation, political violence and personal accountability. Lists of themes are often review-speak for “worthy but dull”, but not in this case. Cleave immerses the reader in the worlds of his characters with an unshakable confidence that we will find them as gripping and vital as he does. Mostly, that confidence is justified.
- Sometimes disturbing but mostly engaging, and often hilarious, tale of sacrifices and consequences.
- The taut spring of Cleave’s intricate plot is a sequence of unpalatable moral decisions that cleverly bind life-choices to the guilty freight of conscience. But this novel’s great strength is the squeamishly raw candour of its protagonists…. “The Other Hand” delivers a timely challenge to reinvigorate our notions of civilised decency.
Published the 22nd day of August, 2008 in The Independent | Reviewed by James Urquhart | Full Review
- Cleave’s writing style is to signpost everything, so no matter how complicated a moment, the reader is forcibly shoved on and over-nannied. Lawrence’s agonising over whether to shop Little Bee to the police is absurdly over-written. The characters are clearly characters. Their words are clearly the invention of a writer’s. They don’t feel “real”…. Like “Incendiary,” this melodramatic novel will sell; clunky as it is, it’s a page-turner. Cleave’s technique is hammer squashes nut. With every motive and action explicitly drawn, fleshed out and explained, there is no room for mystery, ambiguity or even tension. This may work for you – it does for Cleave’s many fans – but it left me with a headache.
- The novel also impresses as a feat of literary engineering. Despite a few too many coincidences and some regrettably lurid scenes … the plot exerts a fearsome grip. Hardly a detail escapes without getting milked for maximum poignancy, and that calls for considerable powers of organisation. Nevertheless, the whole thing is pervaded by a vaguely distasteful glossiness. There are rote little jabs at the cruelty of British immigration policy, but if Cleave is writing from great depths of feeling, he hides it well. At times the novel reads like a more elegant version of the true-life features you might find in Sarah’s magazine: faultlessly relevant, but ultimately cloying.
- Read this urgent and wryly funny novel for its insights into simple humanity, the force that can disarm fear.
- This novel worked on a variety of different levels. For the casual reader, there is beautiful tension created using temporal and point of view shifts, keeping the reader engaged by only hinting at cataclysmic events that will be detailed in later chapters. If there are instances of melodrama, they are moments of joy, sadness and love that an impossible and frighteningly real scenario would bring about between two people in a chaotic and unpredictable world. Ugliness and beauty, for Cleaves, seem inextricable in this wonderfully crafted narrative of displacement, identity and humanity (or lack thereof).
- Utterly compelling, unputdownable, sad and surprisingly funny, “The Other Hand” has won widespread acclaim.
Other books you might also like:
 |
Average Score: 80%
 (5 Reviews) |
 |
Average Score: 74%
 (17 Reviews) |
 |
Average Score: 78%
(10 Reviews) |
 |
Average Score: 85%
(10 Reviews) |
 |
Average Score: 77%
(7 Reviews) |
