Little Bee / The Other Hand - Chris Cleave

Almost all the members of the bookclub finished this book. We all thought it was an interesting story, although we weren't sure that it lived up to the hype about it on amazon and on the back of the book.

We thought that it made us look more closely at the way we in the West live our lives. Little Bee had a great way of showing us how foolish certain aspects of our lives are, for example, why is it ok to have topless women in our newspapers but it's not ok for women to wander the streets topless. Surely if it's acceptable in one place, it should be accepted elsewhere. We also thought it interesting that obviously people native to Little Bee's country are constantly being persecuted and killed, however we in the West very rarely hear about it. We do hear often about white people or Westerners who have been taken hostage in these countries and how much we are willing to do and pay to get their freedom. This gave us something to think about.

We compared prisons with detention centres during our discussion because we felt that both remove liberty and can be used for the right or wrong reasons. They make humans into numbers rather than individuals. We weren't sure which side to take with regard to believing or disbelieving asylum seekers, there are always those we should believe and those we shoudln't. It's a very difficult issue to make a definite decision about.

It was very noticable that there didn't seem to be one good man in the entire book, this was interesting because the book is written by a man! However, his ability to get within the female psyche is not that great. The female reaction to sex expecially didn't ring true with the bookclub members.

Overall we gave this book 5 out of 10. We felt that this book was probably more of a starting point to reading more indepth discussion about the issues brought up in this book. This particular book hops around the issues too much without actually going into them in enough detail for the reader to get a proper handle on them.