My Thoughts On: The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce by  C.S. Lewis

In this amazing story, the narrator is a writer who takes a bus on a journey between hell and heaven in a dream. He starts out in a “grey town” and speaks with several passengers on the bus before their arrival at their destination, which ends up being in the beautiful foothills of heaven. Once they arrive at their destination, the passengers realize they are all ghosts and that the landscape is somewhat painful to navigate. They learn that they will solidify and be able to travel better and more easily upon making the choice to stay in this place and travel further into the mountains, which is deeper into heaven. (The alternative to staying is to get back on the bus and journey back to the grey town, which is to choose an eternity in hell.)

I became a sort-of cheerleader as I read the exchange between the ‘ghosts’ and the heavenly ‘spirits’ who came to assist them in making their decisions on whether to stay or return to the grey town. I became exhausted from nearly holding my breath, waiting on the decisions of these ghosts. I felt like the bulk of humanity that was present on that bus was stupid and silly. But Mr. Lewis really represented people well. He gave a good slice of how people really are. It seemed as though the people who suffered from misery in this book wanted other people to be miserable too, to a fault…and they were willing to give up heaven to achieve that. And the people who were trying so hard to make a point while alive and on earth didn’t want to give up their effort to attain heaven, so they gave heaven up.

I won’t go into too much detail because someone I know is reading this book, but I really loved it. I want to read it again, right now. One day I will read it again, and I may even buy it…which is saying a lot because I don’t often buy books.

One interesting idea presented by George MacDonald (the narrator’s heavenly spirit) is this:

“…both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have  been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”:  little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”

So interesting, that thought. This book is for serious readers only. If you think you *might* want to read it, I beg you to read the summary and if you are still interested in it, then read it. Otherwise, you won’t like it. I loved it.

My Thoughts On: Little Bee by Chris Cleave

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

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.
Nevertheless, you need to know enough to buy it, so we will just say this:

           This is the story of two women. Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice, the kind of choice we hope you never have to face. Two years later, they meet again - the story starts there …

           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.

-(summary from book jacket)

This is all you get when you read the summary inside the cover of the book. You get nothing. Nothing of the story. Nothing of the characters. Nothing of the…well, anything.

If you have gathered anything about me and my reading process at all, you know that I have the quirky capacity to walk about Sam’s or Target taking pictures of pretty books so when I go to the library, I will check them out and read them. This book was spotted at Target, but I actually walked by it for a couple of weeks before I decided I would put it on my list. And by list, I mean take a picture of it and keep it on my phone. I LOVED the cover. But I couldn’t get past the absolute nothingness that was given to me in the summary in the cover. How on earth am I supposed to know if I want to read this book if I don’t know anything about it???

Well, I broke down and checked it out, and I started reading it. It took me awhile to read it, unlike most others, because this book is actually a little on the political side. Kind of like those songs on the radio that have a political message (think newer-Pearl Jam stuff). See, I like to be entertained when I choose to be entertained. And I wasn’t particularly looking for a political message when I started this book. I would have known that if they would have put the summary on the cover, now wouldn’t I? On the flip side, I probably wouldn’t have checked it out and read it. No, I definitely wouldn’t have read it. I might have gotten to it later, but I wouldn’t have read it now. I’ve just come off of Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help…both of which are on the heavier side. So I definitely wouldn’t have read this book. (Well-played by Mr. Cleave’s publicity team, I suppose.)

This book has two major stories that sort of coincide and become one big story over a period of years and a span of continents. And the story is good...I’ll give that to them: I fell hard for Little Bee. She is a lovable little girl and the book’s protagonist. Little Bee doesn’t fit in anywhere she goes. She is displaced by her government and not accepted by the government in the country in which she ends up living. She is a victim of Nigerian politics, international immigration regulation, and being swept underfoot by everyone because it is the easy and natural thing to do. Little Bee has no family because everyone in her family has been massacred by ‘the men’ with machetes for the oil that rests underneath her village, and she just happened to be fast enough to outrun them. Did that make her lucky? Maybe, but maybe not. Little Bee ended up running until she spend two years in a detention center outside of London until her incidental release into the English countryside with no clothes, no food, no money, and no way of helping herself obtain any sort of life for herself.

“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 I was entitled to one.”    -Little Bee

Sarah Summers O’Rourke couldn’t believe the events that took place on what was supposed to be her romantic Nigerian holiday with her husband Andrew. She constantly replays these events in her head. Sarah is wife to Andrew and mother to Charlie, but she most identifies herself and immerses herself in her role overseeing Nixie magazine. When Sarah’s whole life comes to a standstill, it is completely ironic that Little Bee should show up at her door…or is it?

“I went back inside the house, and collected my son and Little Bee. Mismatched, dazed, semidetached, we walked to my husband’s funeral. Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn’t the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn’t deserve my own pity.”-Sarah Summers O’Rourke

Once Sarah and Little Bee unite, the rest of the book is filled with ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ and how these two women unite to celebrate the goodies and overcome the baddies. The story is…good. It does, however, completely drop off in the ending. Imean, it just stops. And I don’t typically like that. Make it a good ending or make it a bad ending, but just make it end. Otherwise I feel like I’m in a freefall, and I can’t stand that!
At another time in my life, I may have felt differently about this book. But at this point, when I finished it two days ago, I needed resolution to the story. And there was none. Perhaps this was Mr. Cleave’s point all along…to stir us as readers up to the point where we want to ‘do something’ about the Nigerian refugees or detention centers or immigration laws or something like that. But at this point in my life, I really just needed to be entertained, and it fell short.

“Imagine how tired I would become, telling my story to the girls from back home. This is the real reason why no one tells us Africans anything. It is not because anyone wants to keep my continent in ignorance. It is because nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.” -Little Bee

So in summary…beautiful story overall. Not all that entertaining in the end, but it had a superior message. And the cover art...front and back...is absolutely stunning.

It should be noted that Chris Cleave also wrote Incendiary, which is already a movie. And I think it is a move politically-charged story as well. I have not read this one yet.

**from here, I read The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. I read it quickly, in a matter of hours. The review will be up soon. The book is riding around with the husband.