Book Club: Little Bee

This week is flying by! I took Monday off to hang out with Scott as his office was closed for the holiday. And I'm taking tomorrow off to head out of town for a girls' weekend. So looking forward to it... and hoping the weather doesn't interfere with travel plans. My family in Kansas City got about a foot of snow, and the storm is heading our way...

I wanted to pop in and chat about our latest book club meeting. We got together at J's apartment last Friday night. She served up salad, stuffed shells, and wine (none for me, of course). The five of us ended up catching up until around midnight!

Our discussion about State of Wonder covered a lot of the unexpected events of the book's second half (we all felt one "surprise" incident wasn't exactly necessary!). Some felt it was tough to get into the story, and others felt like it pulled them in from page one. A novel about medical research and the Amazon isn't my usual cup of tea, but I found it to be fascinating and well-written. As I got into the latter part of the book, I was genuinely surprised at times and loved how the story twisted and turned. I'd recommend it!

Next month, we'll be reading Little Bee: A Novel by Chris Cleave. One of the girls had picked it up recently, so we decided to make it one of our book club picks.

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Amazon.com Review:
Amazon Best of the Month, February 2009: The publishers of Chris Cleave's new novel "don't want to spoil" the story by revealing too much about it, and there's good reason not to tell too much about the plot's pivot point. All you should know going in to Little Bee is that what happens on the beach is brutal, and that it braids the fates of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan (who calls herself Little Bee) and a well-off British couple--journalists trying to repair their strained marriage with a free holiday--who should have stayed behind their resort's walls. The tide of that event carries Little Bee back to their world, which she claims she couldn't explain to the girls from her village because they'd have no context for its abundance and calm. But she shows us the infinite rifts in a globalized world, where any distance can be crossed in a day--with the right papers--and "no one likes each other, but everyone likes U2." Where you have to give up the safety you'd assumed as your birthright if you decide to save the girl gazing at you through razor wire, left to the wolves of a failing state.