The Plot
Kambili's father, Eugene, is a wealthy and overly religious man who not only physically abuses Kambili and her brother, Jaja, but their mother Beatrice as well. It is ironic then that he is one of the biggest philanthropists in their community, and one of its most respected elders. His piety is a mask shielding a deeply troubled man from the rest of the world, a man whose insecurities result in a demand for perfection from the lives of his children and his wife, all of whom he controls like a drill sergeant would his troops. The stifling control chokes his family, condeming his children into a soulless emotional vaccum and hurling Eugene to his eventual death.

Later, we are introduced to Kambili's aunt, a university professor who is everything that her brother is not. A single mother, Aunt Ifeoma is a fiercely independent woman. Where Kambili's mother was lorded over by her husband, Ifeoma is outspoken, an iconoclast challenging institutions of authority from the university that employs her to the government.

Aunt Ifeoma in all her "quest for justice" leaves Nigeria for America with her three children. A family that talked and laughed together finds itself losing touch as the busy work routines of the new world keep them occupied.

Kambili's love interest-a Father Amadi-also leaves America fulfilling her cousin Obiora's musing "from darkest Africa now come missionaries who will reconvert the West."

In the end it is Kambili and her mother who surprise us. Their quiet strength allows them to free themselves from Eugene's stranglehold. After Eugene tears up a painting of his pagan father, it is an enraged Kambili who screams at him, mourning the loss of a man she never knew. A shocked Eugene is compelled to contemplate this act of open defiance, a child of his mourning a man he had explicitly forbidden any relationship with, a child of his taking sides against him with a man who did not believe in his Catholic god. Apoplectic with rage, he beats his daughter to near death.

But such violence as the family had gradually grown inured against is now too much to handle. Beatrice, Eugene's wife and Kambili's mother poisons the old man, unable to bear his brutality a day longer.

Themes

Sometime last year, I met Adichie at a book reading in Minneapolis, where she expressed her interest in religion, family and traditional culture. These passions are the main themes in the book.

Kambili's father Eugene is a prominent member of the local Catholic church whose children attend a private Catholic School. Estranged from his father by a repulsion towards his traditional beliefs, he forbids any contact between his family and his father's paganism. To set his family and himself apart from what he calls the primitive, he does not allow his children to speak Igbo, his father's primary language. When he discovers that his young daughter has broken these bounds and walked in the house of a sinner- his father, he weeps in anguish as he burns her feet in hot water in an act of forced penance. This barbaric and unforgiving heart, exhibited primarily to those dearest to him, his family, is a stark contrast against the life of piety exhibited to the rest of the world.

Freedom is another theme, one whose thread runs throughout the book. Kambili's father, the owner of an independent newspaper, refuses to be silenced by the threat of the military. His standing up to their threats, intimidation and attempts at censorship recalls similar struggles across the world in countries controlled by oppressive governments.

Eugene's family in their turn stand up to him and steadily one by one, from his son to his daughter, and then to his wife are released from his grasp. In the end however, the gaol of his ruthless control is replaced by another, a literal one as Kambili's brother Jaja ends up in prison after taking responsibility for his father's murder. Overnight, the young Kambili takes headship of the family as her mother recedes into the cages of a mental breakdown, the culmination of the family's tragic existence.

I just put in an order for Adichie's second book, a Half of A Yellow Sun.

P.S. If I was Ms Adichie, I would not have allowed my publicist to use this one-line review from the Baltimore Sun on the cover of my book, "One of the best novels to come out of Africa in years." A story for another day, but really? We must not be writing much in that country called Africa.