As I was working tonight, the water cooler let loose a bubble. Sometimes that happens a few minutes after getting some water. But for some reason, the sound made me jump and my heart stopped and my adrenaline started pumping. Just a second later I realized that no one was trying to break in, but the fact that a fairly regular noise in my house made me jump got me started thinking about scary movies.

I think my first exposure to a scary movie was when I was around 8 years old and my babysitter was flipping channels. She landed on Kingdom of the Spiders, a terrible B movie about tarantulas that overtake a town. Totally not scary! Unless you’re 8 years old. I begged her to change it, but she insisted it wasn’t scary. But she didn’t change the channel before they showed a scene where this guy’s face was eaten off by spiders. Again! Totally hilarious! Unless you’re 8 years old.

Then when I was in fourth grade, we saw Watcher in the Woods, a FREAKING DISNEY MOVIE that had me freaked out until my late teens. There’s a scene where a girl is washing her face, and when she looks up in the mirror, there’s someone else staring back at her! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

I don’t see many scary movies, but the ones that scare me the most are the ones that are the most fake. Monsters (i.e. Freddy Krueger, whose name I’m not even sure I’m spelling right but I refuse to google it just in case his image pops up!)? Scare the crap out of me and make me want to leave all the lights on. Real human killers? HAHAHA!! No problem! That’ll never happen to me. But you never know when a monster might get you!

What are the scariest movies for you? Movies about things that could never happen or movies that are more realistic?

Little Bee by Chris Cleave was picked for my online book club’s March selection. It’s been on my radar for a while, but bells and whistles sounded when a friend said she recommended it to her book club, and offered to buy everyone a copy of the book because it wasn’t yet out in paperback.

Let me just get this out of the way: I loved Little Bee.

Little Bee is told from two points of view: Little Bee’s, an asylum seeker from Nigeria who has fled to England, and Sarah’s, a middle class white woman whose husband has just committed suicide. The story is doled out in such a way that the reader gets anxious about what must have happened on the beach in Nigeria. All we know is that Sarah is missing a finger, her husband’s committed suicide, and somehow Little Bee is involved.

Cleave seems to envelop the reader in Little Bee and Sarah’s world. We can hear Little Bee’s thoughts as she is constantly plotting how she would kill herself “in case the men come suddenly”. We can see the juxtaposition between Sarah seeing the world as shades of gray, and her son, who constantly wears a Batman costume, who sees the world as made up of “goodies and baddies”. We can see the reality of Little Bee’s native country, as she imagines how she would explain things to her friends back home.

Where I think the author excels is in getting the reader to examine their own humanity. What would you give up for someone else’s life? When put in this situation, a person learns their character, and in one character’s case in this book, found they came up short.

Here’s a quote from The Neverending Story (the movie) that seems apropos to Little Bee:

“Next is the Magic Mirror Gate! Atreyu has to face his true self!”
“So what? That won’t be too hard for him.”
“Ah! That’s what EVERYONE thinks! The kind people find that they are cruel. Brave men discover that they are really cowards! Confronted with their true selves, most men run away screaming!”

Morality, or the lack thereof, while not overt in Little Bee, is startlingly present. Sarah is morally ambiguous, as she will save someone’s life but refuses to end her extramarital affair. Little Bee is not without moral ambiguity, as she sees someone hurting themself, but comes to their aid a little too late. I think England (and any country that offers asylum) has become calloused, as what Little Bee went through in Nigeria isn’t bad enough (watching her village be massacred and her sister raped and murdered) to offer her asylum. Little Bee is a “drain on resources”, and while England talks a big talk about offering asylum, as Cleave points out, if the text book given to immigrants to prepare for their citizenship test in the UK, Life in the United Kingdom, is riddled with typographical errors and inaccuracies, then how earnest can they really be about offering asylum?

Another aspect I loved about the book was Sarah and Andrew’s marriage. Cleave is able to make you see how consumed Sarah and Andrew were with each other, and then how they deteriorated to strangers.

Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved Andrew, I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven tenths of the earth’s surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it.

…

Within the first month, I’d known he wasn’t the right man. After that, it’s the growing sense of dissatisfaction that keeps one awake at night. The brain refusing to let go of those alternative lives the might have been.

I found Little Bee to be incredibly moving and profound. If forced to confront who you are, who you’ve become, would you run screaming? We don’t always know what little moment will define us, but we will, ultimately, be defined.

Rating: 90 out of 100

Visit Chris Cleave at www.ChrisCleave.com.

Other reviews:

Bermudaonion’s Weblog

Linus’s Blanket

Literary License

Lotus Reads

Whimpulsive

Book source: I bought this book myself.

I want you to know that this post almost didn’t happen after I got a good look at my belly. But what the heck.

This is me at 15 and a half weeks:

Next time I won’t crop out my face, but I’ll also make sure I don’t look insane.

Side story: I have a friend who had a baby boy in July 2009. We work together and I was really excited when she got pregnant. She’s one of the nicest people I know, she’s really smart, and she’s beautiful. I’d hate her if she just wasn’t so dang nice! Another reason I would hate her if I could is because she has no tummy, no pouch, nothing. Her stomach is CONCAVE. That should be reason enough alone to shoot darts out of my eyes at her when she’s not looking. So when she got pregnant, it actually took a while for her to show. One day she came over to my cubicle all excited and was all, “Look! I’m showing a little! I just have to sit down and see how my tummy has a little pouch now?!” I laughed and laughed and laughed, and when I could finally catch a breath, I said, “Honey, that’s called NORMAL. If that’s your pregnancy showing, then I’m pregnant too.”

I still laugh over that because she was so freaking adorable about it. And yes, her stomach is back to concave.

*sigh*

Nothing really new to tell you about this pregnancy. It’s about as symptom free as they come. I’m at 17 weeks now (almost half way there), and I haven’t started to feel the baby yet. I think that’s just cause I don’t know what it feels like. I don’t really have any cravings, and while I look like I’m showing a bit in the picture, the little pregnancy belly I have could easily be mistaken for a muffin top. I thought I gave up awkward body images when I got out of high school, but I guess not.

There are things that happen in books that I just don’t understand. Here’s the first one.

A character cries and doesn’t realize it until they feel their damp cheek.

Am I the only one who’s WELL AWARE when they start crying? Who are these people? Is this kind of like peeing your pants and not realizing it until someone looks at the wet spot on your pants? Or laughing hysterically but having no idea what you’re doing until someone asks what you’re laughing at? “Was I laughing? I didn’t even realize…”

I don’t know if you remember, but The Girl Who Fell From the Sky was a book that I was peeing my pants in anticipation because I was so excited to read it. What made me so excited was that this was the Bellwether Prize for Fiction winner, and that prize is only awarded every two years. I like that the Bellwether Prize’s “intent is to advocate serious literary fiction that addresses issues of social justice and the impact of culture and politics on human relationships.”

In The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, Rachel, only 11 years old, has to move to Portland to live with her grandmother after a family tragedy. Rachel has an African-American father and a Danish mother, she’s mixed-race, with blue eyes, and can’t fit in at school. The boys like her, but the girls don’t. Later someone tells her, “It’s like you’re black, but not really black.” (p. 230)

Rachel is trying to navigate her grief at losing her family, while also trying to do well at school. Her paternal grandmother loves her but doesn’t show it well, so it’s her aunt, a kind and sensitive woman, who she gravitates towards.

This book has tragedy in spades.

The narration goes back and forth between Rachel in first person, Brick, a young boy who witnessed the tragedy, Laronne, Rachel’s neighbor from Chicago, and Roger, Rachel’s father. Brick, Laronne, and Roger are all told in third person. I thought the other points of view brought an interesting angle to the story, as we got to see things that Rachel might not have thought to tell us. For example, I was horrified when Laronne remembered talking with Rachel’s mother, and Rachel’s mother calling her kids “jigaboos”, slang for the “n” word. Rachel’s mother didn’t know what jigaboo meant, she was just using what she thought was a cute pet name for her kids (which she picked up from her boyfriend, Doug). You could feel Rachel’s mother’s horror at her use of the derogatory term just radiating off of the page.

Brick had a particularly interesting side story, and while it wasn’t his family who died, what he went through to find Rachel was heartbreaking and heartwarming, all at the same time.

This is an important book about a biracial girl, how she comes through her grief, and how she forms her identity.

While I enjoyed The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, particularly by the end (which was a tad too tidy, but I liked it nonetheless), ultimately this book is forgettable. I think, though, that this book would be an amazing book club pick, and if discussed with other readers, would make more of an impression on those who read it. I believe I’m finding it forgettable because I haven’t had anyone to discuss it with, no one to help me cement the characters in my mind.

Rating: 85 out of 100

Heidi Durrow’s website.

Other reviews:

APOO Bookclub

Book source: I received this book, unsolicited, from the publisher.