From my bookshelf: Little Bee

For this month, my book club chose Little Bee by Chris Cleave.  Overall this book was good and I would recommend it to others. 

The story is heavy with some horrific scenes but full of impact.  Definitely a book that you think about after you put it down.

But something was off that I could not put my finger on for a quite a while.  Maybe I was not in the right mental place to read this book.  Maybe it was the writing style.  Maybe the cryptic hype on the back cover oversold it. Who knows. But mostly, I think this is another case of a male author trying to write for two main characters that are women - Sarah, a journalist and mother from the UK, and Little Bee, a girl from Nigeria. He came close, but didn't get it quite right. In my opinion, their voices were a bit off, a little too matter of fact.

I found the plot and message of the book to be eye-opening, well thought out, and often moving.  But the characters themselves seemed a bit too one-dimensional for me.  I was not able to relate to them.  As mother, I would not have made some of the same choices that Sarah did, especially with her child in tow.  So due to all of that, I liked this book, but did not love it.