Little Bee (24)

Title: Little Bee
Author: Chris Cleave
Genre: Fiction

I enjoyed this book just fine but ended up walking away from the experience of reading it a little disappointed. Why? Well, the book jacket built up some serious expectations. It reads:

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 this:

It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific.

The story starts there, but the book doesn’t.

And it’s what happens afterward that is most important.

Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don’t tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.

It was a very enjoyable novel but I don’t have the urge to tell everyone about it and the “magic” of the book, as it were, was in the writing, not in the supposed “shocking” moment of what happened on the beach. I would have probably enjoyed the book even more if the book jacket didn’t try to convince me that there was a deep, deep shocking secret that knowing it would completely ruin the book. I could tell you what the secret is and I don’t think it would decrease your enjoyment of the book that much at all.