Little Bee by Chris Cleave

Some readers stay away from sad endings. As my husband says, there's so much sadness in real life, why go looking for it in fiction? True, I cannot argue with that. We all get a taste or more of the tragic in our pilgrimage. But then a novel as well-crafted as Chris Cleave's Little Bee comes along, and I not only swallow sad, I lap it up like honey.

The book was a Christmas gift, and, fellow readers, you know I love free. That's why the gentle warning of my friend that the book was kind of sad didn't deter me. I simply had nothing else to read at the time. (Apparently, this problem disappears once one gets a Kindle--there's always something seemingly better on the virtual shelf.) Later, midway through Cleave's story, I was grateful that I was so hungry for a story that I took a chance. An orphaned teenager calling herself Little Bee has escaped Nigeria and is being detained in in a English refugee center. She is trying to get to the home of a British couple she met two years ago while they were on an ill-fated holiday in her country. Told in alternating voices, the narrative crackles with the contrast between Little Bee's determined humor and British wife and mother Sarah's baffled bravery. Right from the beginning, there is tremendous charm to the story. (Unexpected charm, the reader rejoices, if she was forewarned about the book's sadness.) Witness the friendship between Little Bee and Sarah's son, a Batman-dressed moppet who provides a nice dash of four year old farce. Read Little Bee's spot-on humorous deconstruction of those Brits and, in a larger sense, the civilization of convenience and calm we take for granted. The contrast between these two worlds, close geographically with differing brutality, is at the heart of the novel. Little Bee hungers desperately for Sarah's world, and Sarah is equally wounded by hers.

Thankfully, with contrast comes comparison. We're all more alike than different, Cleave seems to be saying. A white woman in England can mean the world to a black African girl, and she can return the favor. Everyone, no matter where he or she lives, is capable of change and acceptance. The author makes no secret he is personalizing the term "globalization." His meaning encompasses someone like Little Bee finding her way to your front door and asking for kindness.

I am so glad I read this sad book. The charm and little bits of joy peppering its pages far outweighed any gloom. The characters of Little Bee and Sarah are entrenched in my brain now, and when I think of them, it is not with sadness but with joy.

Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell

Man oh man, I've been busy lately. Family, work, and all the usual adjustments to such have eaten up a good chunk of my reading time. Have no fear, though, I haven't abandoned my mission to document the best books I've ever read. Though my posts may be few and far between, I'm still here, weighing what belongs and what doesn't.

One book that definitely belongs on this list is Gail Caldwell's memoir of friendship, Let's Take the Long Way Home. Literary critic Caldwell was a great friend of Caroline Knapp, best known for her own memoir, Drinking: A Love Story. The two don't quite hit it off at first, but are later drawn together by a mutual love of dogs and literature. Knapp and Caldwell also share hard-won victories over alcoholism. Both unmarried, independent career women, these two authors become each other's family, as good friends so often do. The stories of them sculling and dog walking together show how the friendship grows into a deep, lasting bond. But Knapp, a lifelong smoker, falls terminally ill with lung cancer, and Caldwell must weather this storm both with her, and, later, without her.

At its heart, this memoir is a love story, because a rich friendship like this one could not be anything but love. Where family fails us, friendship sails in and saves. A good friend brings us food when we're sick, reassures us we're okay, lets us cry on her shoulder. The best female friend is an amalgam of the most desirable traits of mother and father, brother and sister, and, yes, husband. Gail Caldwell pays homage to the wholeness a good friend brings to life.

However, Let's Take the Long Way Home is just as much about grief as friendship. I've never read a more concise, whip-sharp discussion of the grieving process. Caldwell is a good writer, and she brings the full force of her narrative power to analyze the mystery and misery of losing a loved one. I prefer her vignettes to those in Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Awe permeates Caldwell's prose: praise for Knapp and the life she lived, stunned wonder at her quick death, and thanksgiving over and over again for what they had together. By the memoir's end, the reader gets the sense that Caldwell is moving closer to some sort of understanding of death, an inchoate one to be sure, but an understanding nevertheless.

Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier

I sometimes confuse this book with City of Falling Angels, and, in my defense, they both inhabit the same corner of my mind reserved for shadowy, magical writing. Furthermore, the same crumbling graveyard-type angels are apt symbols for both stories. Yet, Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier is quite different from the Venice book. It is a novel of Edwardian England, childhood friendship, and women's suffrage. Told from several characters' perspectives, the story gives the reader an authentic feel for London during the brief reign of Edward VII. Two young girls, Maude Coleman and Lavinia Waterhouse, meet in a cemetery and start a friendship with draws their very different families together. The cemetery (and the eerie stone figures within) is the dominant setting of the novel, representing the Victorian fascination with death, and by contrast, the new ways of life beginning to emerge in the just-begun 20th century. Chevalier's novel Girl with a Pearl Earring (her take on the origin of the famous Vermeer painting) is better known. I liked Falling Angels better because of its excellent sense of place; Pearl Earring has a well-described setting as well, but I prefer 19th c London to 17th c Holland.