“I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar wants us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them, we must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scare does not form on the dying. A scar means I survived…. Sad words are just another beauty, a sad story means, the storyteller is alive.”

This is just one of the ways Little Bee pulls you into her story, into her life making you a part of it. I love hearing about and reading the immigrant story, it’s fascinating I pay attention to the details; if I listen ever so closely I learn a lot about the places and the people and observe how the media does not even scratch the surface of world events

The book starts with Little Bee saying “Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl. – A Pound coin can go wherever it thinks it will be safest.”

Little Bee is an African teenage girl who finds herself in an immigration detention center somewhere near London, UK. Her world before was a little village, her family, friends and cassava fields, then “the men came” After which she had a chance encounter with a young British couple on a beach, a couple who should have stayed behind their resort’s walls instead they ventured out on their own.

On the beach where the couple first meets Little Bee they are confronted with a choice, “the men” said/asks -

“First time I hear white man say my business not his business. You got our gold you got our oil, what is wrong with our girls?”

Little Bee the novel is very well crafted it vividly captures two worlds colliding and the voice of the characters are so authentic that half way through, not being familiar with the author, I thought Chris Cleave is a Nigerian then Google corrected me.

With this Book (Little Bee) I am reminded of a true story, a “beauty” as I agreed with Little Bee to call sad stories, told to me almost eight years ago by a man I met on the train. Originally from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, he moved to the capital where he completed his studies and was climbing the corporate ladder. Uncle J is what my sister and I call him now, said he visited his family back in his village often and on one of his visits “the men came” he made it out and with the help of UNHCR he was resettled in North America from a refugee camp in a neighbouring West African country.

By writing the book Chris Cleave has given a voice to thousands of Uncle J’s and their villages along the Niger Delta.