Book Review: The Other Hand (aka Little Bee)

Book #91 of 2010

“Learning the Queen’s English is like scrubbing off the bright red varnish from your toenails in the morning after a dance. It takes a long time and there is always a little bit left at the end, a stain of red along the growing edges to remind you of the good time you had. So, you can see that learning came slowly to me.” — Chris Cleave, The Other Hand

Quite apart from the hideous cover, I’ve been wanting to read this book for a while. The lovely Philippa got it for me over the summer, and I finally settled to read it at the end of October.   

The storyline is what made me want to read it, and it seemed like it would be executed well. The book is about Little Bee, a Nigerian asylum-seeker, and Sarah, a British magazine editor. The link between them is explained as the story develops. There are parts of this that are well written or heartbreaking, especially the sacrifices made and Little Bee’s story. The plot is, as a whole, quite good, and the twists and reveals reasonable. However, there’s also an abundance of poor language, mostly in the dialogue (when Lawrence speaks especially, but also Sarah at times) that seems plain ridiculous.

This was definitely a book where I could see so easily how he made it so far on word of mouth, especially when people are less nitpicky about what they read. It’s not a bad book, but if it had been well written (which, in certain parts, he proved he could do), with a few tweaks in the plot, it could’ve become an instant contemporary classic. As is, though, I doubt it’ll ever be more than a decent-selling book. I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend it, but I wouldn’t tell anyone not to get it, either.