Book Review: Purple Hibiscus by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie - Entrepreneur Generations

A couple of summers ago, our 9th grade team was looking near and far for a world literature book that was appropriately accessible and challenging for 9th graders and written by a women. After quite a lot of debating, we settled on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (my review of that collection here). This was right around the time that Americanah, and Adichie herself, were becoming a cultural zeitgeist, with appearances on Beyonce songs and talk shows, and the collection itself lent itself really well to the 9th grade: the book features a dozen short stories, about half set in the United States and about half set in Nigeria, and Adichie does a lot of cool things with the stories, giving voice to Nigerian women and depicting struggles we don't normally see depicted in fiction. Some of the short stories -- like the title story, which features that rarest of rare points of view, 2nd person, and the evocative "The Headstrong Historian" -- are some of my favorite short stories I've ever read.

I've really enjoyed teaching The Thing Around Your Neck the last couple of years, and the kids, for the most part, also enjoyed the collection. This year, however, one of our team members expressed some reservations with a sex scene in one of the stories that we didn't teach from the collection (I wrote about the line in the story, "Imitation," in my blog entry here), and she was so passionate about it that we've been looking for another work. In addition, the 12th grade teacher wants to use the collection with 12th graders. So we are getting pressure from two different places to switch it out, and we are nothing if not flexible.

The title of our unit is "The Danger of a Single Story," taken from the title of Adichie's TED talk of the same name, so we stayed with Adichie with our first attempt at finding an alternative text: we went to her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus.

I finally finished this book, and I have such mixed feelings about it.

Looking back at it, there are a lot of things to like, in terms of teaching. There is Kambili, the young protagonist and narrator who, like in To Kill a Mockingbird, doesn't understand the events around her too much, but is sensitive and detailed in her descriptions. There's a father ("Papa") at the center of this novel, but he's as unlike Atticus Finch as a father can be: a cruel and abusive man, he regularly beats his children and wife. However, the community loves him, as he's a benevolent and pious man who is devoted to his church and charitable to local schools, and he publishes a newspaper which stands up against the oppressive regime that has taken over Nigeria. This conflicted, morally ambivalent man could offer some interesting contrasts with Troy Maxson, another conflicted and morally ambivalent man we encounter in the 9th grade curriculum. And Adichie constructs several symbols and contrasting settings which are ripe for analysis for 9th graders.

There is also Aunty Ifeoma, Papa's sister, who acts as foil with Papa. Like Papa, she is Catholic (there are interesting religious conflicts in the novel, as Papa has disowned his own father because he still practices their traditional religion rather than the religion of the colonizers), but not like Papa is. While staying at their aunt's house, Kambili and her old brother Jaja learn a lot about the world, which their wealthy father had carefully sheltered them from.

The conflicts in the novel are interesting, and the conclusion is both surprising and satisfying. So why am I not more intrigued by the prospect of teaching this novel? Adichie is one of my favorite writers, but this is not the assured writer of The Thing Around Your Neck and Americanah. The pacing is slow, especially in the first half, and I worry about reluctant readers putting the book down and not picking it up again (like I have several times in the last few years, as the book has bubbled up around our department). Kambili is a sweetheart, but sometimes you just want to shake some sense into her as a narrator. The conflicts are interesting, but they're mostly a slow burn variety, until they get really violent (and disturbing abuse abounds). The fact that there is a satisfying and emotional payoff at the end -- the women in this novel definitely have agency -- might make me able to sell it, but the truth is that it's slow with lots of descriptions of food and flowers that don't play to Adichie's strengths. At 336 pages, the pace doesn't pick up until the last half or third of the novel, and I worry this book might take up a lot more time than the six short stories we read in the previous version of this world literature unit.

I'd like to find another short story collection, or a shorter, or at least a more quickly-paced novel. However, if we can't find anything, I would give Purple Hibiscus a try with 9th graders. Has anyone ever tried it?

from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/2g51smf Book Review: Purple Hibiscus by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie - Entrepreneur Generations

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