Little Bee

by Chris Cleave. New York: Simon & Schuster, c. 2009. 271 pages. ISBN 9781416589631 Published as The Other Hand in the UK.

Little Bee is unable to flee the terror that has chased her from her small village (sitting atop newly discovered oil deposits) to a British immigrant detention center. A horrific encounter with Little Bee on a beach in Nigeria follows tourists Sarah and Andrew O’Rourke back home to England and forces them to remember choices they have tried to forget.

The Road to Damascus - A Brief Review

from Early Reviewers for LibraryThing

Road to Damascus by Elaine Rippey Imady

This is a pleasant memoir about a Western woman’s life married to a Syrian man and living in the Middle East. I appreciated the mainly positive accounts and stories about life in Syria and the personal histories the author presents for the reader. Favorable depictions of Middle Easterners and Muslims are few in popular literature; however, I found little in Imady’s writing to hold or grip me to her story. There is a genuine love and caring in her story but I simply could not care very much. I feel that if she had written some of this book earlier in her life and closer to when some of the events had happened there would have more life and passion to her writing.