Review of Purple Hibiscus - Times Literary Supplement Online 1

Times Literary Supplement
http://www.powells.com/review/2004_05_23.html

Purple Hibiscus
by Chimamanda Adichie

An Igbo patriarch
A Review by Ranti Williams

Post-colonial Nigeria has produced a notable tradition of prose writing from which comes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which tells of a teenager watching her family break down in a country that is doing the same. As in many post-colonial societies, the personal and political are inseparable, although here the disintegration of the Nigerian state (a military coup takes place early on in the story) is as nothing compared to the fracturing family at the centre of the novel. The events take place in Igboland in Eastern Nigeria, and the narrator, fourteen-year-old Kambili, is the obedient only daughter of a harsh Roman Catholic patriarch, Eugene, a big man and wealthy local manufacturer in the city of Enugu. Eugene is the proprietor of a newspaper in which, at considerable personal cost, he bravely champions freedom of speech against military tyranny at the same time as he rules his home with the most tyrannical of iron grips.

Adichie builds a complex picture of a man struggling with his own demons, taking out his struggles on those he loves: his wife, Beatrice, son, Jaja, and Kambili herself. It should be hard to sympathize with a man who beats his pregnant wife and who, after deploring the soldiers' torture of his editor with lighted cigarettes, pours boiling water over the bare feet of his adored daughter as a punishment for coming second in class. And yet Eugene, self-made and ultimately self-hating, is the book's loneliest character; his misunderstanding of Christianity has led him to reject the animist beliefs of his own ageing father and to repudiate the old man himself, perversely hating the sinner more than the sin. Kambili writes of her father at one point: "It was... as if something weighed him down, something he could not throw off".

The novel's picture of modern Nigeria is an authentic one; it depicts a land full of potential and with an educated middle class, a country in which a coup can suddenly erupt and a local newspaper editor can be killed for what he writes; a place whose inhabitants are aware of their nation's flaws and yet are fiercely patriotic, loath to emigrate until things get truly desperate. This is the fate of Eugene's sister, Ifeoma, a widowed university professor. Her household is the opposite of Eugene's; she allows her children relative freedom of expression and thus introduces Kambili and Jaja to a world beyond their strictly regimented home, with the result that they cannot return without the unravelling of their tightly wound family life.

Chimamanda Adichie's main strength is dialogue: as her characters speak, one hears the voices of modern Nigeria. Her descriptions, however, sometimes lack subtlety, and she has a tendency to overdo the symbolism: objects break as the family falls apart; the purple hibiscus runs rampant over the tidy garden as the children and their mother test their freedom. The narrative voice mostly convinces as the naive tone of a sheltered child facing the adult world, although, at times, Kambili can sound simply disingenuous. This is particularly true of the treatment of her schoolgirl crush on the impossibly virtuous young Catholic curate, who is the book's only really unconvincing character. Overall, Purple Hibiscus, which has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, is a compelling tale told well by a confident voice with much potential for the future.


http://allafrica.com/stories/200411100883.html

Nigeria: Nigerian Novel Explores Religion and Silence
10 November 2004
Posted to the web 10 November 2004

Norah Vawter
Washington, DC

Purple Hibiscus, the debut novel of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a flavorful, intense story of an unhappy family, and also of Nigeria's slow recovery from colonialism. Kambili lives with her brother and parents in a huge compound in Enugu, Nigeria. A smart fifteen-year old who is trying to overcome her shyness, Kambili narrates the story from beginning to end. She is one of those narrators who lets you read between the lines, who doesn't give away too much, and often seems smarter than the adults. Around the bare bones of the plot, she wraps detail upon detail of domestic life. I could almost taste the moi moi and cashew juice, could almost see the red and purple hibiscuses in the flowerbeds. "Our yard was wide enough to hold a hundred people dancing atilogu," Adichie writes, "spacious enough for each dancer to do the usual somersaults and land on the next dancer's shoulder. The compound walls, topped by coiled electric wires, were so high I could not see the cars driving by on our street."

There is a long tradition in literature of oppressive and angry fathers. Kambili's father has two sides, at least. Each resonates clearly with the reader, making the father a complex and compelling character. A lesser author would have turned him into a simple villain. Adichie does not. Eugene is a successful businessman, a pillar of the community who owns a factory and a newspaper that courageously condemns injustice. He is fiercely religious, devoted to Catholicism, to God and purity. He beats his wife and children every time they sin or fail to live up to his expectations. Eugene does rush them to the hospital on a number of occasions, and it's obvious that he cares for his family. Kambili and her brother Jaja, both teenagers, are almost machine-like in their interactions with other people. They avoid their father's wrath at all costs. Their mother, Beatrice, seems beaten down by the abuse she has taken and watched. She nurses the children's wounds and chooses colors for the curtains.

What makes Purple Hibiscus so interesting is the position of the family within the larger picture of Nigeria. This is a story about Nigeria's recovery from colonialism because Eugene was among the first generation to come into contact with the European missionaries. In order to go to school, children needed to convert to Christianity, so Eugene and many of his contemporaries did. He takes the teaching so seriously that he condemns all practice of his native religion, and becomes uptight and self-righteous. Religion is everything. Perfection is the goal. He accepts nothing short of perfection from himself or his family. Every time they slip, he punishes them. Just how much he punishes himself is up to the reader to ascertain. We are left wondering how deep the wounds go, and who we should root for.

Purple Hibiscus begins with a nod to Chinua Achebe, "Things began to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagère." The novel tracks this family as the chilly, icebound order begins to break down, and something new replaces it. Visiting their aunt and her three children, Kambili and Jaja get a chance to see how a more ordinary, relaxed family functions. They come to know their "heathen" grandfather, whom Eugene will not see because he insists on practicing his traditional Igbo religion. For all its subtle, quiet storytelling, it is an exciting book, with too many climaxes to name. Adichie kept tricking me, making me think I had figured everything out before coming to yet another climactic scene.

When I began reading this book, I thought it was a story of adolescence, of a bright young girl coming of age. I expected more hormones, more rebellion, more Kambili. Instead I find that Kambili is telling a story that is bigger than she is. She could be called a protagonist, but oftentimes her job is to watch, to try to understand, to follow. The narration is her chance to speak, something she rarely does in her life at the beginning. Painfully shy, even around her family, Purple Hibiscus gives Kambili the chance to find her own voice.

The novel deals adeptly with themes of language and silence. It is written in English and peppered with Igbo, the local language that Kambili's family speaks. The result is a text that seems richer and more layered than it would have otherwise, but there is more to this. Characters speak English in formal settings and Igbo in informal ones. The father rarely speaks Igbo. Sometimes when he is angry he speaks in Igbo; other times he says a very long prayer in English.

Just as the book's characters speak English in formal settings, they also behave differently in public and private. Throughout the book, characters struggle with the task of communication. This is a novel of silence, of things left unsaid. It raises more questions than it answers. Is Kambili a storyteller, and why can she say things in her narrative that she would never say to her family? Why is silence so important to communication?
This is no easy book. Early on, I thought it might have a moral or might fit into a box, but Adichie surprised me by showing how complex these characters really are. I would recommend Purple Hibiscus to anyone who loves a good psychological mystery when it is wrapped up as a literary novel or to anyone who wants to be drawn into a story by elegant language and robust plot. This is not a delicate novel. Several times I cringed as I read of the abuse Eugene was inflicting on his children and wife. But it's not all depressing. Kambili's cousin, Amaka, listens to Fela Kuti, is a fierce young feminist and asks tough questions. Her whole family cackles when they laugh. There are scenes of laughter and warmth, laughter that is often earned as the relief from suffering.

Overall, Purple Hibiscus is a keeper. It is sharp, passionate, and compelling. It drew me into the narrative like I was one of the family and kept me interested like I had a personal stake in its conclusion.

Norah Vawter is an intern at allAfrica.com, focusing on the book review page. She received her B.A. from the College of William and Mary, where she studied English literature and edited the fiction section of the William and Mary Review.



http://www.curledup.com/hibiscus.htm

It is difficult to describe the oppression that haunts every page of the brilliant novel Purple Hibiscus. Sure, it could be the oppressive heat described so well by the young author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, brought about by the harsh African harmattan winds. Or it could be the force of an unquestioned faith in religion. But in Purple Hibiscus, the worst kind of oppression is the stifling power of abuse — verbal, mental, and physical abuse wrought by Kambili’s father, “Papa".

Papa is an interesting character study — a person so completely sold on the superiority of the Western mode of thought and action, especially through religion, that he will stop at nothing to see it enforced in his own house. He is at once consumed by raw extremes of passion—extreme love and, worse, extreme anger. His family, including the protagonist, Kambili, live every minute in sheer terror, looking upon Papa for constant approval. Adichie’s descriptions of Papa’s stifling presence are extremely well done—one’s heart bleeds for the family.

During one particularly telling episode, Kambili has stood second in her class at school and the sheer terror in her voice is scary — one waits with bated breath for the nasty consequences that are sure to follow:

“The Reverend Sisters gave us our cards unsealed. I came second in my class. It was written in figures: “2/25.” My form mistress, Sister Clara, had written, “Kambili is intelligent beyond her years, quiet and responsible.” The principal, Mother Lucy, wrote, “A brilliant, obedient student and a daughter to be proud of.” But I knew Papa would not be proud. He had often told Jaja and me that he did not spend so much money on Daughters of the Immaculate Heart and St. Nicholas to have us let other children come first…I wanted to make Papa proud, to do as well as he had done. I needed him to touch the back of my neck and tell me I was fulfilling God’s purpose. I needed him to hug me close and say that to whom much is given, much is also expected. I needed him to smile at me, in that way that lit up his face, that warmed something inside me. But I had come second. I was stained by failure.”
Eventually Kambili and her brother Jaja get a taste of freedom when their aunt Ifeoma takes them away for a little vacation to her country home. Yet even here, while the two are free from their father’s physical presence, they can understandably never shake off their father’s shadow. Every time the phone rings, Kambili quakes in fear.



All around them, Nigeria is slowly disintegrating just as the family slowly does. A violent coup causes Aunt Ifeoma to leave the country for America. Adichie makes some political statements here, “these are the people [Westerners in general] who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times that we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.” These political statements might be lost on the reader only because Kambili’s own personal tragedy seems so much more urgent and dangerous.

Kambili and Jaja along with their long-suffering mother eventually liberate themselves from the tyranny of their father. It is a questionable freedom, though. Like any survivor of abuse, Kambili finds that release without closure is small success. “Silence hangs over us [now],” she says toward the end of Purple Hibiscus, “but it is a different kind of silence. One that lets me breathe. I have nightmares about the other kind, the silence of when Papa was alive. In my nightmares, it mixes with shame and grief and so many other things that I cannot name, and forms blue tongues of fire that rest above my head, like Pentecost, until I wake up screaming and sweating.”

Purple Hibiscus is so stunningly good it is hard to believe that its author was just twenty-five years old when she wrote it. Her debut novel proves beyond a doubt that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the most powerful young voices to recently emerge from Africa.

A blurb on the back cover of the book says that Purple Hibiscus is one of the strongest debuts since Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. I agree. However, Roy, it seems, has found Small Things a difficult act to follow up. One hopes that Adichie doesn’t find a fresh start quite so daunting a task. We need to hear from her; time might indeed heal all wounds, but we need to hear that Kambili is better now. What a treat it would be to know that Kambili has now savored true freedom for a while —that freedom for her, is no longer a rare, fragrant, purple hibiscus.




http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/03/07/boadi07.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/03/07/bomain.html

Love in a time of terror

Any child growing up in Africa is bound to know a thing or two about tyranny. The signs everywhere have been much the same: the coded conversation of parents, the friends in exile, in jail, the untouchable, preposterous, terrifying figures of absolute authority, the way the familiar and the frightening are woven together. To get to school, you may have to pass the corpse at the roadblock. It is all perfectly normal. Purple Hibiscus is about this weird normality, about the way tyranny insists that everyone dream the national nightmare, and it works by playing off the innocence of childhood against the brutal inanities of strong men in a state gone rotten.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about Nigeria, a country that has known little but coup and kleptomania since independence, but her novel crosses borders because it is really a parable about love in a time of terror. Devout, shy, 15-year-old Kambili and her brother Jaja are children of a rich man, a towering, god-like presence in the life of his beloved daughter and a fervent Catholic whose money and connections keep the world at bay. Then comes the coup, and waves of terror begin to wash around the privileged compound.

Inside the big house, Kambili confronts two versions of her father. There is the champion of human rights who publishes a newspaper that defies the military junta, and there is the sadist who beats his wife senseless, the Catholic bigot who does not hesitate to sacrifice his children to his religious obsession. The ways of God and the ways of government (a conflation frequently made in Africa) are increasingly hard to tell apart. Kambili finds out, almost too late, that the divine justice her father invokes and those that murder to preserve their political fortunes are closely linked.
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It is only when Kambili goes to spend time with her Aunty Ifeoma, a university teacher, that she begins to understand that there may be another way. Aunty Ifeoma is outspoken and sane - always a radical surprise in a despotic society.

In her quiet, unsensational record of the surges of power that kill what they touch, young Kambili is a lucid eye fixed on the ineffable, often triumphant stupidity of those who crush the life out of those they swear they intend to save. The purple hibiscus that blooms in Ifeoma's garden - alive, delicate and precious - becomes the symbol of everything a merciless father and violent regime would trample.

Adichie's superb control of her material seems to falter in the last chapters and the novel sputters out in an unpersuasive brew of rage and revenge. But it doesn't really affect her achievement. Purple Hibiscus is a beautifully judged account of the private intimate stirrings of a young girl faced with the familiar public obscenities of tyrannical power, and Adichie is a fresh new voice out of Africa.



http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=8988

When Freedom Flowers

Book Review by Liv Lewitschnik, July 2004

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, describes a Nigerian family living in a country torn between contradictions. Although a military coup unsettles the population - streets erupt with riots as soldiers hunt down dissenters - the story's main protagonist, Kambili, lives a protected life in Enugu.

Fifteen year old Kambili, her brother, Jaja, and their mother enjoy luxurious comfort inside a large house. High walls topped with electric wire shut out any disruptions. Materialistic abundance is provided by the father of the family, Eugene. He owns several factories and a democratic newspaper, and is a devout Catholic.

Eugene is driven by religion and freedom. He refuses to be silenced by the threat of military repercussions and prints the truth as violence escalates. Amnesty International even gives him a human rights award for his efforts.

Being such a good citizen, it is surprising to discover the tyrant inside Eugene. He rules his family with an iron fist, forbidding them to speak Ibo in public as he proclaims English is the language of civilised people, punishing them severely for ungodly sins - such as not coming first in class - and forcing the children to follow meticulously planned schedules. Sleeping, eating and praying are measured in minutes alongside study and family time. The intensity grows when family life unfolds, laying bare the sickening behaviour of the fundamentalist father.

Eugene's rules and the house compound imprison the family - the youngsters are only allowed sparse contact with their grandfather, a non-Catholic. Abuse and mental strain flow through the story, but Eugene's crazed influence is balanced against the sincere love his family feel for him. Adichie's writing is compelling, confident and beautiful although her story narrates quietly - perfectly describing the shy and introverted Kambili.

Low key language explains grim domestic oppression, but blooming words break with a claustrophobic world. Intricate descriptions of Nigerian food, flowers, plants and people make the book an explosion of colours, scents, culture and feelings.

As the novel advances alongside a changing Nigeria, the family structure begins to crack. The threatening outside world seeps inside the thick compound walls. Eugene's newspaper is forced to go underground. Even the fierce December wind that cloaks the world in red Sahara sand is menacing, and the family take refuge in their winter house in Nsukka where Eugene's sister, Ifeoma, and her three children live.

Ifeoma's liberating, strong character enters the novel with decisive steps, bright lipstick and roaring laughter - surprising Kambili and Jaja with charm, warmth and openness. Outspoken and independent, Ifeoma fights against poverty and increasing instability at the university campus where she lectures.

Kambili and Jaja go to stay in Aunty Ifeoma's house and experience Nigerian everyday life for the first time. In the small flat several people sleep in the same room, everyone helps with the washing up, the floors are made of cement instead of marble and praying is spiced up with singing.

Slowly Kambili and Jaja open their eyes to another reality, where anyone is allowed to discuss at the dinner table and express their thoughts. Amid poverty and sparse means, music, make-up and football set their minds free.

Adichie's unrestrained novel is a spellbinding depiction of contrasts between rich and poor, old and new, oppression and freedom. The 25 year old Nigerian author uses a mature and convincing language, delightfully exploring Kambili's world against an unsettled Nigerian society - vibrant but dangerous. As with Ifeoma's rare purple hibiscuses growing in her unruly garden, oozing defiance and beauty, the novel is captivating and should be read by those who want to see, smell and taste a piece of Nigeria.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A46513-2003Dec31¬Found=true


Fiction
A Moveable Feast
A Nigerian's coming of age with her boisterous relatives yields appetizing results.

Reviewed by Bill Broun
Sunday, January 4, 2004; Page BW08

Americans have no problem eating a Big Mac with their hands, but get them to venture into a West African restaurant, where forming balls of fufu (a thick yam porridge) with the fingers is de rigueur, and they will suddenly go Edwardian on you. "What? No silver?" If the breathtaking debut of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie does nothing else (and it does considerably more), it shows that Nigerian gastronomy is as mannered and complex as anything in Europe or America.

But Purple Hibiscus is more than a sub-Saharan version of Isak Dinesen's "Babette's Feast" with cassava lumps replacing baguettes. In this maturation tale about the sheltered Kambili Achike, a 15-year-old Igbo girl of devastating shyness, the frequent meals help assert a vision of middle-class life that impugns postcolonial pessimism and fear about Africa. Adichie's picture of Nigerian domesticity is troubled, to be sure -- the story takes place in a time similar to Gen. Sani Abacha's junta years (1993-1998) -- and it is shaped fundamentally by political upheavals around it. But so were the characters in Dinesen's other famous work, Out of Africa -- that quintessential fantasy of 20th-century Africa where only whites are granted complex interior lives.

While the action mostly takes place after a coup led by an Abacha-like monster named Big Oga, the novel's painstaking tensions more immediately unfold through a "food" problem at home. Kambili and her brother, Jaja, have nervously returned after a Palm Sunday mass during which Jaja defiantly refused to eat communion because the wafer, he claims, gives him bad breath. For their tyrannical father, Eugene, this is a spiritual outrage and a family betrayal. A successful factory owner and politically daring newspaper publisher in the city of Enugu, and a Big Man within his umunna, or extended family, Eugene is generous and hard-working. But he uses Catholicism as a matrix of control over the ignorance and disorder he perceives around him. He finds pliant corroborations in the reactionary parish priest, Father Benedict, a British missionary who re-Latinizes the liturgy and frowns on lively Igbo handclapping in church. Kambili's mother, Beatrice, is a gentle but impotent character who softens but cannot stop Eugene's relentless stamping out of "sin" and imperfection. Part JFK, part Citizen Charles Foster Kane, Eugene tells his daughter, "Because God has given you much, he expects much from you." Indeed, far too much.

Adichie is at her best in giving the traumatized Kambili a playful individual dignity that challenges the humorless power-mongering of her father and her country's dictators. When Eugene's paper criticizes the dictatorship and is forced underground, Kambili reflects: "I knew that publishing underground meant that the newspaper would be published from a secret location. Yet I imagined . . . the staff in an office beneath the ground, a fluorescent lamp flooding the dark damp room, the men bent over their desks, writing the truth." As Adichie later suggests, however, political truth has limitations. In this thinking, she is very much the 21st-century daughter of that other great Igbo novelist, Chinua Achebe.

When Kambili and Jaja get the chance to visit their mouthy Aunt Ifeoma, a university lecturer in the town of Nsukka, they go fearfully, carrying written schedules from their father in their pockets. Aunt Ifeoma takes the ridiculous schedules away, and both young people for the first time taste "a different kind of freedom." They learn to appreciate the animistic spirit world of their Papa-Nnukwu, or grandpa, the humbler but infinitely happier meal-making of Aunt Ifeoma's boisterous family, and, through the denim-wearing priest named Father Amadi, a more humane Catholicism. As the novel's later tragedies hit, Kambili finds herself with an unexpectedly strong new emotional foundation, one based on cooperation, tolerance and female power.

The novel's organization is conventional, the prose muscular. One minor shortcoming is Adichie's tendency to repeat certain imagery or gestures beyond thematic efficacy. The human throat and eyes are mentioned too often, as are Aunt Ifeoma's and her family's "cackles." Adichie, who was born in 1977, has time to refine her prose.

And be warned: The eating never stops in Purple Hibiscus (the titular blooms are themselves edible, of course). Nearly every page holds something tasty: plates of jollof and coconut rice, bottles of cashew juice, roadside vendors hawking bread in hot banana leaves, cow horns full of palm wine. In one sense, the story is a long, spectacular meal, of several seatings over several days. It's enough to drive a hapless American to try cooking that most famous dish of West Africa, egusi. Now will someone pass the fufu, please? •

Bill Broun lectures in the English Department at Yale University, where he is a resident fellow at Timothy Dwight College.



http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/09/14/RV294130.DTL

Wriggling in the grips of father, god and country

Reviewed by Sandip Roy
Sunday, September 14, 2003

In the very first page of "Purple Hibiscus" the reader encounters "Communion," "missal," "palm fronds" and "Ash Wednesday," and you know that religion will hang like a miasma over Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel. Adichie, 25, who divides her time between her native Nigeria and the United States, has already been compared to Arundhati Roy, whose own first novel, "The God of Small Things," stunned the literary world by snapping up the Booker Prize. While Roy seemingly came out of nowhere like a comet, Adichie has been short-listed for the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing and nominated by the PEN Center USA for the David T.K. Wong Short Story Award.

At the core of "Purple Hibiscus" are a brother and sister who seem to have a perfect life, but in reality it is slowly suffocating them. Fifteen-year-old Kambili adores her father, who is much respected for his commitment to democracy and the free press as well as his generosity to the church. But she also knows he is tyrant and a religious fanatic who visits every harsh punishment on his family for all manner of infractions, imagined or real. When Kambili comes second in her class, she is terrified of the disappointment she will cause her father, who often told her that he did not spend so much money on her school to have her let other children rank first.

She witnesses first-hand the power of his rage. "Mama was at the door when we drove into our compound. Her face was swollen and the area around her right eye was the black-purple shade of an overripe avocado." But what makes "Purple Hibiscus" compelling is that her father is not just a simple wife- bashing hypocritical brute. He also has morals. In fact his morals are so inflexible he has abandoned his own father for still worshipping the old gods. His love for his family is as overwhelming as his remorse for the pain he visits on them. And Kambili needs his love, his smiles, his hugs even as it sucks all the life out of her. His wealth and love are the shield against the world outside and she clings to it at all cost.

But when the tyrannical bonds that glued the family together start breaking,

it is like watching a traffic accident in slow motion.

The book opens with an act of defiance when Kambili's brother, Jaja, refuses to go to Communion, and then it moves into a flashback. The implosion of the family starts when the children visit their father's estranged and much poorer sister, Ifeoma. Suddenly they are in a world where when beef turns mottled brown, her aunt just boils it well with spices and cooks away the spoilage.

With the rough and tumble love of her aunt and cousins, both Kambili and Jaja start to bloom and realize how airless their life has been. They suddenly learn to relate to their godless grandfather, at whose home they had always been forbidden to eat or drink water. Kambili even timidly falls in love with a charismatic young priest who takes her to football games. Sometimes the "poor but happy" relations seem too cliched, gamely laughing through water shortages, sharing their meager rations but keeping their apartment sparkling clean. On the other hand, Kambili's mother as the battered wife hanging on to her marriage because she has nowhere else to go seems a rather familiar character.

What redeems "Purple Hibiscus" is the complexity and tenderness with which Kambili is sketched. She is an unlikely heroine, painfully shy, with few friends. Out of place with her cousin who teases her because, as the rich man's daughter, she doesn't know how to peel yams, and always wishes she could say the smart things her brother says that impress their father, Kambili's entire identity is tied to her father's approval. "Then he reached out and held my hand, and I felt as though my mouth were full of melting sugar."

Setting her story against an ever-worsening security climate in Nigeria, where democracy is slowly being snuffed out and press crackdowns are worsening,

Adichie paints a society that is slowly collapsing in on itself. For many Nigerians trapped in a harsh and unforgiving system, the only desperate way out is to think about starting afresh in a place like the United States. But just as Kambili's love for her father makes it excruciatingly hard for her to leave, people like her aunt must make the terrible decision of whether it's worth leaving all that's familiar, even if it's painful, for a fresh start in an unknown country.

"Purple Hibiscus" is at once the portrait of a country and a family, of terrible choices and the tremulous pleasure of an odd, rare purple hibiscus blooming amid a conforming sea of red ones.

Sandip Roy hosts "UpFront," New California Media's show about California's ethnic communities on KALW 91.7-FM.