Little Bee

#1101
Title: Little Bee
Author: Chris Clive
Year: 2010
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 266

Ignoring the publisher's hype, which is stupid, inaccurate, and really has nothing to do with the book, but is about the buzz they hope to generate, oooh:
  

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.

This is not particularly special. It is funny at times, and referencing a horrific scene is pandering and titillating, not useful. The sentence about the relative importance of the action is true of pretty much any novel or story. I did not want to tell everyone about it. There was no "magic" to "unfold." This, friends, is marketing gone awry, and makes me that much more wary of Simon & Schuster. I'll assume Cleve had no say in this nonsense.

The novel itself begins interestingly and engagingly, and the audiobook is well-voiced. It becomes clear through much parallelism and symbolic talk that while framed as a literal story, it is actually more postmodern than that. I remained involved until very near the end, when the main characters suddenly engaged in completely unbelievable acts that were neither literally narratively supported nor well-enough prepared for by a big enough shift into postmodernism. I'm a fan of and then things started to get weird, or we've shifted into another kind of story. This could have gone that way, and I've have recommended it. Instead, the ending can't suspend my disbelief or my appreciation for narrative artifice--it just doesn't work.