Little Bee

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I'm in a book club.  Each month one person chooses a book and we all read it and then get together to discuss it.  This month's book was Little Bee by Chris Cleave.  It's about African refugees in Britain, and oil wars in Nigeria.  I'm a sucker for happy endings, so I was a little bit apprehensive.  I just didn't see how it could have a happy ending and still be believable.  In fact, I figured that it would be a pretty depressing book.  

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I'm happy to say that I was wrong.  Little Bee is definitely a book about serious issues, but it also has some laugh-out-loud funny parts.  That's not to say that Cleave makes light of serious situations, but rather that he recognizes that life is funny, even when it's tragic.  The ending isn't really happy, but it isn't really sad either.  It was just open ended.

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A bonus for our book club this month was that Chris Cleave came to Portland and did an event at Powell's.  We didn't realize this when the book was chosen, so it was just luck or fate or something.  He was a really great speaker, and I felt more hopeful about the non conclusive ending after hearing him talk.  I also bought his other book Incendiary, so you can look forward to me reviewing it sometime in the future.