Fifteen-year-old Amadou and his young brother Seydou spend every day picking cacao pods on a plantation in the African Nation of Ivory Coast. Two years before, Amadou left his impoverished village in search of work, hoping to make enough money to help his family survive the dry season. Younger brother Seydou insisted on tagging along, wanting to be just like his big brother. Thinking they were being hired for day jobs working close to home, the boys were tricked into forced labor. Now, Amadou and Seydou must pick enough cacao pods daily to avoid the brutal beatings of the bosses in an attempt to pay back the money they "owe" to the plantation owner so they can return home. Problem is, the bosses won't tell Amadou how much that is, and in the two years he's lived on the plantation, he's never seen any of the boys actually repay their debt.

Near starvation, beaten down by the constant abuse and hard physical labor, Amadou is beginning to give up hope of ever escaping the plantation. That is, until Khadija shows up. The only girl Amadou has ever seen brought to the camp, she is a spitfire, constantly fighting against the bosses and trying to escape. Despite the rules he's made for himself over time designed to keep him and Seydou safe from the worst of the abuse, Amadou finds himself being inspired by her spirit, and when Seydou is injured cutting cacao pods, Amadou realizes that if he doesn't act soon, there's a good chance neither of them will survive.

This story is one of struggle and survival that takes the reader into the world of forced labor and human trafficking in a very intimate way. Amadou fights to retain his humanity, while at the same time trying to harden himself against the suffering of others. He sees it as the only way to survive his captivity; make no friends, stick your neck out for no one, keep your head down and do as you're told. Without Seydou, I think he would have lost himself completely, but having to protect his younger brother, physically and emotionally, forces him to persevere against the despair and hopelessness that could easily come from living in slavery.

The Bitter Side of Sweet is not Sullivan's first foray into human rights abuses in Africa. Her book, Golden Boy, describes the trafficking of albino children in modern-day Tanzania, who are considered by practitioners of traditional medicine to have special curative powers-but only in pieces. Sullivan brings a well-researched perspective to issues of human trafficking of children in that part of the world. Each of her books ends with an afterword that gives the real-life context for the stories she tells and highlights the ways in which global consumption and the effects of poverty drive modern-day human slavery. Sullivan's writing doesn't shy away from the brutality inflicted on victims of trafficking, but it also doesn't glorify it in any way. Her books are a good avenue for exposing young people to an important social justice issue, one that affects them whether they realize it or not due to the increasing globalization of our economies., and the way consumer behavior affects the people who produce the things we consume.

It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

This Monday post finds me sitting at the computer much later than usual, still nursing my coffee.  Ahhh, sweet three day weekends!  Pretty soon every day will feel like a three day weekend-only 6 more days of school left.  Well, two more days of "school" and then a picnic and three half days.  Surely we will all survive!

This week I finished Little Bee, by Chris Cleave, as well as When She Flew, by Jennie Shortridge.  That brings me up to a whopping 30 books on the year (for a full list click here), putting me very far behind in my quest to complete the 100+ Book Challenge.  Come on, summer!  I've got some serious making up to do.

Right now I am reading Dead as a Doornail, by Charlaine Harris.  Number five in the Sookie Stackhouse series, I'm only about 50 pages into it but I am enjoying it just as much as the others.  That may have something to do with the fact that I just finished watching the HBO series On Demand-I figured I better keep myself immersed in Bon Temps if I don't want the show to outpace me!  I got #5 and #6 together through Bookswap, so I may just read Definitely Dead next.

Hope everyone has a great week!

Little Bee, Chris Cleave

Little Bee is the story of a Nigerian refugee, an English woman, and a superhero.  The refugee is Little Bee herself, a 16 year old Nigerian girl who fled her country to escape retribution for being witness to the destruction of her village. It seems her village had the bad luck to be located on top of a large reserve of oil, and the government and the oil companies wanted to get at it without having to worry about little things like relocating people or paying them fair value for their land.  On the day "the men came", Little Bee and her sister watched as their family and friends were killed and their houses burned to the ground.  They escaped through the woods, only to be caught hours later on the beach.  Improbably, Sarah, the Englishwoman, and her husband were walking down that beach, on a vacation.  When the men caught up with the girls, Sarah and her husband tried to protect them, with tragic consequences.  Two years later, Little Bee contacts Sarah.  She's in England, having stowed away on a boat and spent the time since they last met in a detention center.  Little Bee's call starts another sequence of tragic events in motion for Sarah, her husband, and her son, Batman.

I don't usually read reviews of a book while I am reading it, but I did look into this one a bit.  Mostly because the back cover has such an unusually cutesy "summary" for a rather tragic story.  It reminded me of the Series of Unfortunate Events narrator, who was constantly telling you to stop reading, only in reverse.  Anyway, the reviews were pretty evenly mixed between good and bad, and I guess that's how I felt about the novel in general-good and bad all mixed up together.

So, what's bad?  I understand suspension of disbelief when reading fiction, but the idea of two middle-class English people choosing to take a vacation to Nigeria seemed too implausible to me.  Maybe I don't know enough about the tourist industry in Europe, but Nigeria, with it's oil wars, seems like a strange place to go. Without that visit to the beach, none of the rest of the novel would have been possible the way it was written.  However, I'm not sure why we needed to see the story of an African refugee through the eyes of a middle-class English woman at all.  Cleave seemed to be trying to equate the experience of Sarah with the experiences of Little Bee, and frankly that is just ridiculous.  It felt very much like white-liberal-guilt-redemption fantasy to me.  Sadly, in our world, it does often happen that the only way we pay attention to the plight of those in the developing world is by how it affects our own experiences.

What's good?  Little Bee as narrator makes the rest of the slightly unbelievable story worth it.  Her  voice as written by Cleave is lyrical and innocent, yet worldly and wise.  My favorite thing in the book is the first line:  "Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of and African girl."  Little Bee's point of view makes everything that Sarah and her family go to look small.  While his portrayal of her could also smack of "noble savage" stereotype, she is shown with a depth of human emotion and a capacity for good and for bad that makes her completely relate-able.    What is also good is the fact that regardless of how he goes about it, Cleave does a good job highlighting some of the problems of refugees.  Most rational people would consider Little Bee a political refugee, but because England did not recognize the oil wars in her country "officially", she was left in a gray area legally.  I was shocked to discover after reading a bit that she was only 14 when she came to England, but she was thrown into detention with adults and given no schooling.  Our oil addiction in the developed world helped create the situation in the first place, but we avert our eyes to the consequences, and then call the displaced human beings refugees or illegal aliens, and deport them back where they came from.

Final verdict-an entertaining, imperfect, enlightening, enjoyable read.  I mean really, aren't we all a little good and a little bad thrown in together?