Sarah's Missing Middle Finger
The novel does a fair bit of obsessing over Sarah's finger. And for good reason – it's the symbol that holds together the different parts of the novel while also deepening its conversations about...
The Hunter
It's not insignificant that the finger in question is the middle one – the one you wave in the air like you just don't care. The hunter, being paid by oil companies to silence Little Bee and her...
Sarah
The stump of Sarah's middle finger is a major catalyst for her trips down memory lane, which begin at Andrew's funeral. Here's one example:I sat in the pew, massaging the stump of my finger, and fo...
The Colors of Little Bee's Life
Colors are important to Little Bee. They're key tools in her storyteller's toolkit. She uses them as imagery to help us really visualize what she describes. She also uses them to help us get a sens...
The Color Gray
I am a born again citizen of the developing world and I will prove to you that the color of my life is gray. (1.36)Gray, as we learned in preschool, is what happens when we mix black and white toge...
The Bag of Lemon Yellow
When Little Bee and the other three girls are released from Black Hill Immigration Removal Center, they're given clear plastic bags containing their (very few) possessions. Little Bee describes how...
Passages and Crossings
Notice that there are lots of mobile settings in the novel (and, no, we're not talking about phones) – the River Thames, the ocean, the cargo ship Little Bee stows away on to reach England, the t...
Andrew's Study
Andrew's study is a site of some major transformations throughout the novel. Andrew has being doing research on asylum seekers and immigration detention centers since he met Little Bee in Nigeria....