Little Bee

Another 'makes-you-think' book that I had to plug. The book jacket of Little Bee reads:

"We don't want to tell you what happens in this book. Nevertheless, you need to know enough to buy it, so we will just say this: This is the story of two women. Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice, the kind of choice we hope you never have to face. Two years later, they meet again -- the story starts there... Once you have read it, you'll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, don't tell them what happens. The magic is how the story unfolds."

This book is fiction, but the same types of things happen to women every day in places like Nigeria, where the main character of the book is from. The writing is beautiful, but can be almost painful to read at times. However, nobody learned anything by staying in their comfort zone. I'll share a couple of excerpts that jumped out at me....and then, you should go out and get this book.

"In my village, each year when the rains stopped, the men went to the town and they brought back a projector and a diesel generator, and they tied a rope between two trees, and we watched a film on a white sheet that they hung from the rope. There was no sound, only the rumble of the generator and the shrieking of the creatures in the jungle. This is how we learned about your world. the only film we had was Top Gun and we watched it five times. It was a film about a man who had to travel everywhere very fast, sometimes on a motorbike and sometimes in an aeroplane. We discussed this, the children in my village, and we decided two things: one, that the film should be called The Man Who Was In a Great Hurry and two, that the moral of the film was that he should get up earlier so that he would not have to rush to fit everything into his day, instead of lying around with the woman with blond hair that we called The Stay-In-Bed Woman."

"Everything was happiness and singing when I was a little girl. There was plenty of time for it. We did not have to hurry. We did not have electricity or fresh water or sadness either, because none of these had been connected to our village yet. In the village that we did not yet know was built on an oil field and would soon be fought over by men in a crazy hurry to drill down to that oil. This is the trouble with all happiness -- all of it is built on top of something that men want."

"Even the missionaries had boarded up their mission. They left us with the holy books that were not worth the expense of shipping back to your country. In our village our only Bible had all of its pages missing after the forty-sixth chapter of Matthew, so that the end of our religion, as far as any of us knew, was My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? We understood that this was the end of the story."

Dark? Yes. Sad? Yes. Hopeful? Also, yes.