A solid sophomore effort, and hopefully a sign of even better things to come.
Cleave follows up his outstanding debut (Incendiary, 2005) with a psychologically charged story of grief, globalization and an unlikely friendship.
The story opens in a refugee detention center outside of London. As the Nigerian narrator—who got her nickname “Little Bee” as a child—prepares to leave the center, she thinks of her homeland and recalls a horrific memory. “In the immigration detention center, they told us we must be disciplined,” she says. “This is the discipline I learned: whenever I go into a new place, I work out how I would kill myself there. In case the men come suddenly, I make sure I am ready.” After Little Bee’s release, the first-person narration switches to Sarah, a magazine editor in London struggling to come to terms with her husband Andrew’s recent suicide, as well as the stubborn behavior of her four-year-old son, Charlie, who refuses to take off his Batman costume. While negotiating her family troubles, Sarah reflects on “the long summer when Little Bee came to live with us.” Cleave alternates the viewpoints of the two women, patiently revealing the connection between them. A few years prior, Sarah and Andrew took a vacation to the Nigerian coast, not realizing the full extent to which the oil craze had torn the country apart. One night they stumble upon Little Bee and her sister, who are fleeing a group of rapacious soldiers prowling the beach. The frightening confrontation proves life-changing for everyone involved, though in ways they couldn’t have imagined. A few years later Sarah and Little Bee come together again in the suburbs of London, and their friendship—in addition to that between Little Bee and Charlie—provides some salvation for each woman. Though less piercing and urgent than his debut, Cleave’s narrative pulses with portentous, nearly spectral energy, and the author maintains a well-modulated balance between the two narrators.
A solid sophomore effort, and hopefully a sign of even better things to come.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8963-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
Ms. Jansson, who wrote those "Moominland" fancies for children, has directed her inventive hook-and-button plain talk at some adult concerns. In this series of brief dialogues and adventures of Grandmother (85) and Sophia (ten), the second childhood parallels the first in new awarenesses and incipient rebellion; but on the lonely way of the aging, hobbled by physical frailty, there are moments of sudden, inexplicable sadness. Grandmother and Sophia for the most part are honest contemporaries; they forage on their nearly isolated island, plot and explore, solemnly converse and flare up at one another: "Shall I tell [your father] how you were brave?" asks Grandmother. "You can tell it on your deathbed so it doesn't go to waste," says Sophia. "That's a bloody good idea," decides Grandmother. But while the family (the father is there but not heard from) goes about island survival and diversions—the lights of Midsummer Eve, drought, a flood and storms, an alien neighbor—Grandmother tentatively exposes herself to feelings about life and its endings: "Unless I tell [a tale from my youth] . . . it gets closed off and then it's lost." She is puzzled by an elderly friend's calm: ". . . don't you ever get curious? Or upset? Or simply terrified?" Old woman and child edge toward their own thresholds, and at the close Grandmother is resting and waiting. Spindrift perceptions, fresh and penetrating.
Pub Date: April 28, 1975
ISBN: 978-1590172681
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1975
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