Little Bee by Chris Cleave

From the back cover, "We don't want to tell you WHAT HAPPENS in this book. It is a truly SPECIAL STORY and we don't want to spoil it....Once you have read it, you'll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens. The magic is in how the story unfolds."

While I don't completely agree wholeheartedly with the entirety of the above, I will honor it. This damn book is quotable. I scribbled in the margins. A LOT. Brackets, arrows, hash marks, sweeping lines. Obviously much of what strikes a chord with the reader is directly proportionate to what they already think about life, or the circumstances of their own, but most of this is universally appealing and applicable. One quote was sent with flowers to a friends' mother, another on a postcard to a friend.

The language of this book made me think about things simple and profound, in ways both simple and profound. It made me stop. It made me process things like the wind. It made me believe that I was, that I could be, the wind. The author's ability, as a male, to believably speak from a female first person perspective, is impressive. Perhaps only the third male author to ever convince me.

"Do these scars cover the whole of you? I thought that would be pretty, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers what us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

In a few breaths' time I will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them the same way we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile."

"Tea is the taste of my land: it is bitter and warm, strong, and sharp with memory. It tastes of longing. It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from. Also it vanishes--the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup."

"I did not want to hurt her any more. I did not want to tell her what happened, but I had to now. I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us."

"Handing out in-flight meals in a plane crash. We escaped our own tragedies and into each other. Nothing serious. Nothing sentimental. Just a merciful interruption. A brief, blinking cursor before our old stories resumed.

But it was gorgeous. I gave myself completely. It happened easily, without any effort. It just happened; it wasn't an act. I felt agonies of tenderness. ...To really become myself, I had to go the whole way and fall. Again, I didn't have to make an effort. All I had to do was to permit myself to topple. This is quite safe, I told myself: the psyche is made to absorb the shock of such falls."

"Happiness isn't something one can pick up off the shelf, it's something one has to work at."

"Trust between adults is a hard-won thing, a fragile thing, so difficult to rebuild."

"We knew what we had: we had nothing. In our village our only Bible had all of its pages missing after the forty-sixth verse of the twenty-seventh chapter of Matthew, so that the end of our religion, as far as any of us knew, was My God, my god, why hast thou forsaken me? We understood that this was the end of the story.

That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know that I was entitled to one."