Jul 03 2009
The Buzz on Little Bee
“On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty, too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want 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 scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”
That’s an excerpt from Little Bee, an unique and poetic book by Chris Cleave. I love this book. I can’t say much about it because it’s important to let the story unfold on it’s own, but it begins with a young woman from Africa leaving a detention center in Britain to search out the only person she knows in the country she has risked so much to relocate to. How she knows this person, and what results from this desire to seek him out is an unusual and compelling story that will stay with you, and, I suspect, eventually find its way to film.
