Under the udala trees

Review by New York Times Review

THE GIFT OF FAILURE: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed, by Jessica Lahey. (Harper, $15.99.) Overinvolved, hypercompetitive parenting has stunted the competence and resilience of an entire generation of children, Lahey argues. As an educator and a mother, she is well situated to assess the damage: In her view, an intense fear of failure hampers the development of many young people. I MUST BE LIVING TWICE: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2014, by Eileen Myles. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Myles's poems in this collection thrum with energy, whether focused on attraction, appetites - for food or otherwise - or bygone selves. In her writing, "the birth of the cool often manifests itself with a kind of willful amateurism," our reviewer, Jeff Gordinier, wrote. THE INVENTION OF NATURE: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, by Andrea Wulf. (Vintage, $17.) As a pre-eminent scientist who influenced Darwin and many others, Humboldt, a German naturalist, geographer and explorer, proposed that Earth is a single organism. Modern thought is suffused with his ideas, but the man himself has largely receded from view. Wulf revisits his stunning discoveries in her account, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2015. COUP DE FOUDRE: A Novella and Stories, by Ken Kalfus. (Bloomsbury, $17.) This collection's namesake novella centers on the fictional president of an international financial organization accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. The masterly story, which closely resembles the real-life case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, "enters the mind of a megalomaniac who conflates his own ruin with that of the European economy," Andrew Sean Greer said here. FARTHEST FIELD: An Indian Story of the Second World War, by Raghu Karnad. (Norton, $16.95.) India's contributions to World War II - more than two million men and women served - have been all but scrubbed from prevailing accounts, even on the subcontinent. After unearthing his family's history, Karnad delves into the country's role in the conflict and the peculiarities of fighting in service of the British Empire even as India struggled for independence from it. UNDER THE UDALA TREES, by Chinelo Okparanta. (Mariner, $14.95.) Amid the chaos of the Biafran war, Ijeoma, a child in Nigeria, is sent away to work as a servant in another village. She soon falls in love - with another girl. After the pair are discovered, Ijeoma returns home and learns to reconcile her desires with a society intent on suppressing them. THE TWO-STATE DELUSION: Israel and Palestine - A Tale of Two Narratives, by Padraig O'Malley. (Penguin, $18.) O'Malley, who also researched seemingly intractable disputes in Ireland and South Africa, levels evenhanded criticism at both Palestinians and Israelis, and grimly assesses the feasibility - political and economic - of the two-state proposal, favored by leaders across the globe.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 23, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

Nigeria's repressive attitude against same-sex relationships forms the scaffolding for Okparanta's (Happiness, Like Water, 2013) deeply affecting debut novel about a young woman's coming to terms with her sexuality and the choices it forces her to make. Ijeoma is only 11 when her idyllic childhood in the small Nigerian town of Ojoto is violently interrupted by the civil war. Unmoored and displaced by the violence, Ijeoma meets another refugee, Amina, discovers her sexuality, and must wrestle with its repercussions. Even if Ijeoma's character is too often defined only by her orientation, this is a remarkable portrait of a young woman's coming-of-age in a society where rigid interpretations of the Bible label same-sex relationships as an abomination, and where violence is all too often part of the solution. The fact that Nigeria criminalized same-sex marriages in 2014 makes Okparanta's tale that much more sobering and urgent. It is especially gratifying that one of the defining tag lines of the feminist movement, a woman without a man, just might be co-opted here in another time and place.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Okparanta's excellent debut novel is a heartbreaker. Ijeoma is a young girl in civil war-torn Ojoto, Nigeria. When the war takes her father, and her mother can no longer care for her, she is sent away to family friends in the city of Aba. While with them, Ijeoma, part of the Igbo tribe, meets Amina, an orphan from the Hausa tribe. Despite the heavy cultural and religious taboos, the girls fall in love and begin to explore their sexuality. This behavior comes to an abrupt halt when they are caught and Ijeoma returns to her mother, who inundates her in religious instruction. Ijeoma and Amina attend the same school and wrestle the conflict between their attraction and the pressures upon them. After Amina marries a man, Ijeoma is devastated, but soon meets another woman, Ndidi. Eventually, caving to pressure, Ijeoma marries her childhood friend Chibundu and tries to be a happy wife but as time passes, Ijeoma must contend with her feelings for Ndidi, which she must keep secret, and finally make a fateful decision. Okparanta's characters are just as compelling as teenagers as they are as adults and readers will be swept up in this tale of the power of love. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Review by Library Journal Review

After 13-year-old Ijeoma is uprooted during the waning days of the Nigerian Civil War, she becomes a housemaid for a grammar school teacher and his wife who are friends of her late father. Joining this makeshift Igbo family is Amina, a Hausa orphan who becomes Ijeoma's confidant. Okparanta's novel, after her story collection Happiness, Like Water, tells of regret and remorse and of using prayer to dominate and douse thoughts and desires, as both girls are sent to a religious academy to "reform" their "immoral" behavior. In several brief chapters, a now-senior Ijeoma takes readers on a wistful journey, with each section offering just enough suspense to make readers want to turn the page. There are the frequent Bible sessions with Mama, who reiterates Adam and Eve, while Ijeoma questions her ability to love and be loved. There is also the burgeoning relationship with local teacher Ndini and the hasty marriage to childhood friend Chibundu in an attempt to save Ijeoma from violence (or even death) if her relationship with Ndini is exposed. VERDICT This absorbing story parallels the ongoing struggle for equality in Nigeria and is a powerful contribution to LGBT and African literature. Readers will finish the book hoping that every however-flawed character will find his or her own version of happiness. [See Prepub Alert, 3/9/15.]-Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

In 1968, during the second year of the war between Biafra and Nigeria, 11-year-old Ijeoma is sent away from her home in Ojoto for safety by her mother, Adaora. Ijeoma's father, Uzo, is dead, destroyed in a bombing raid that nearly decimated their village, and her mother is quickly unraveling, unable to cope with the ongoing war and famine. But Adaora's love for her daughter is limitless; when Ijeoma was born early, for example, Adaora gave herself headaches learning about nutrition to make sure her baby grew healthy. Okparanta is masterful at articulating the pressures living through endless violence has on each of her characters' psyches; Adaora crumbles under the harshness of the ongoing war. Her plan is to go to her parents' house in Aba and see if things are better there while Ijeoma stays with friends in Nnewi; she'll send for the girl to join her when it's safe. But Ijeoma feels this separation is prompted less by necessity than by the fact that Adaora now finds her daughter an impossible burden. Alone in Nnewi, Ijeoma falls in love with another displaced girl, Amina. But when their relationship is discovered, Ijeoma is sent back to her mother, who is determined to teach Ijeoma that two girls can't be romantically involved. In the years following, Ijeoma must reconcile her feelings toward women with the pressure to marry a man and be accepted in a country that makes being gay punishable by death. In language both sparse and lyrical, Okparanta manages to articulate a child's wide-eyed understanding of the breakdown of the world around her. We see, too, a detailed rebuilding of that world along with Ijeoma's maturity into womanhood. Here is writing rich in the beautiful intimacies of people who love each otherand wise about the importance of holding onto those precious connections in a world that is, more often than not, dangerous and cold. Written with courage and compassion, this debut novel by Okparanta (Happiness, Like Water, 2013) stunningly captures a young girl's coming of age against the backdrop of a nation at war. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1   Midway between Old Oba-Nnewi Road and New Oba-Nnewi Road, in that general area bound by the village church and the primary school, and where Mmiri John Road drops off only to begin again, stood our house in Ojoto. It was a yellow-painted two-story cement construction built along the dusty brown trails just south of River John, where Papa's mother almost drowned when she was a girl, back when people still washed their clothes on the rocky edges of the river.     Ours was a gated compound, guarded at the front by a thicket of rose and hibiscus bushes. Leading up to the bushes, a pair of parallel green hedges grew, dotted heavily in pink by tiny, star-like ixora flowers. Vendors lined the road adjacent to the hedges, as did trees thick with fruit: orange, guava, cashew, and mango trees. In the recesses of the roadsides, where the bushes rose high like a forest, even more trees stood: tall irokos, whistling pines, and a scattering of oil and coconut palms. We had to turn our eyes up toward the sky to see the tops of these trees. So high were the bushes and so tall were the trees.     In the harmattan, the Sahara winds arrived and stirred up the dust, and clouded the air, and rendered the trees and bushes wobbly like a mirage, and made the sun a blurry ball in the sky.     In the rainy season, the rains wheedled the wildness out of the dust, and everything took back its clarity and its shape.     This was the normal cycle of things: the rainy season followed by the dry season, and the harmattan folding itself within the dry. All the while, goats bleated. Dogs barked. Hens and roosters scuttled up and down the roads, staying close to the compounds to which they belonged. Striped swordtails and monarchs, grass yellows and redtops ?-- ?all the butterflies ?-- ?flitted leisurely from one flower to the next.     As for us, we moved about in that unhurried way of the butterflies, as if the breeze was sweet, as if the sun on our skin was a caress. As if slow paces allowed for the savoring of both. This was the way things were before the war: our lives, tamely moving forward.     But in 1967, the war barged in and installed itself all over the place. By 1968, the whole of Ojoto had begun pulsing with the ruckus of armored cars and shelling machines, bomber planes and their loud engines sending shock waves through our ears.     By 1968, our men had begun slinging guns across their shoulders and carrying axes and machetes, blades glistening in the sun; and out on the streets, every hour or two in the afternoons and evenings, their chanting could be heard, loud voices pouring out like libations from their mouths: "Biafra, win the war!"     It was that same year, 1968 ?-- ?the second year of the war ?-- ?that Mama sent me off.     By this time, talk of all the festivities that would take place when Biafra defeated Nigeria had already begun to dwindle, supplanted, rather, by a collective fretting over what would become of us when Nigeria prevailed: Would we be stripped of our homes, and of our lands? Would we be forced into menial servitude? Would we be reduced to living on rationed food? How long into the future would we have to bear the burden of our loss? Would we recover?     All these questions, because by 1968, Nigeria was already winning, and everything had already changed.     But there were to be more changes.     There is no way to tell the story of what happened with Amina without first telling the story of Mama's sending me off. Likewise, there is no way to tell the story of Mama's sending me off without also telling of Papa's refusal to go to the bunker. Without his refusal, the sending away might never have occurred, and if the sending away had not occurred, then I might never have met Amina.     If I had not met Amina, who knows, there might be no story at all to tell.   So, the story begins even before the story, on June 23, 1968. Ubosi chi ji ehihe jie: the day night fell in the afternoon, as the saying goes. Or as Mama sometimes puts it, the day that night overtook day: the day that Papa took his leave from us.     It was a Sunday, but we had not gone to church that morning on account of the coming raid. The night before, the radios had announced that enemy planes would once more be on the offensive, for the next couple of days at least. It was best for anyone with any sort of common sense to stay home, Papa said. Mama agreed.     Not far from me in the parlor, Papa sat at his desk, hunched over, his elbows on his thighs, his head resting on his fisted hands. The scent of Mama's fried akara, all the way from the kitchen, was bursting into the parlor air.     Papa sat with his forehead furrowed and his nose pinched, as if the sweet and spicy scent of the akara had somehow become a foul odor in the air. Next to him, his radio-gramophone. In front of him, a pile of newspapers.     Early that morning, he had listened to the radio with its volume turned up high, as if he were hard of hearing. He had listened intently as all the voices spilled out from Radio Biafra. Even when Mama had come and asked him to turn it down, that the thing was disturbing her peace, that not everybody wanted to be reminded at every moment of the day that the country was falling apart, still he had listened to it as loudly as it would sound.     But now the radio sat with its volume so low that all that could be heard from it was a thin static sound, a little like the scratching of skin.   Until the war came, Papa looked only lovingly at the radio-gramophone. He cherished it the way things that matter to us are cherished: Bibles and old photos, water and air. It was, after all, the same radio-gramophone passed down to him from his father, who had died the year I was born. All the grandparents had then followed Papa's father's lead ?-- ?the next year, Papa's mother passed; and the year after, and the one after that, Mama lost both her parents. Papa and Mama were only children, no siblings, which they liked to say was one of the reasons they cherished each other: that they were, aside from me, the only family they had left.     But gone were the days of his looking lovingly at the radio-gramophone. That particular afternoon, he sat glaring at the bulky box of a thing.     He turned to the stack of newspapers that sat above his drawing paper: about a month's worth of the Daily Times, their pages wrinkled at the corners and the sides. He picked one up and began flipping through the pages, still with that worried look on his face.     I went up to him at his desk, stood so close to him that I could not help but take in the smell of his Morgan's hair pomade, the one in the yellow and red tin-capped container, which always reminded me of medicine. If only the war were some sort of illness, if only all that was needed was a little medicine.     He replaced the newspaper he was reading on the pile. On that topmost front page were the words SAVE US. Underneath the words, a photograph of a child with an inflated belly held up by limbs as thin as rails: a kwashiorkor child, a girl who looked as if she could have been my age. She was just another Igbo girl, but she could easily have been me.     Papa was wearing one of his old, loose-fitting sets of buba and sokoto, the color a dull green, faded from a lifetime of washes. He looked up and smiled slightly at me, a smile that was a little like a lie, lacking any emotion, but he smiled it still.     " Kedu? " he asked.     He drew me close, and I leaned into him, but I remained silent, unsure of how to respond. How was I?     I could have given him the usual response to that question, just answered that I was fine, but how could anyone have been fine during those days? Only a person who was simultaneously blind and deaf and dumb, and generally senseless and unfeeling, could possibly have been fine given the situation with the war and the always-looming raids.     Or if the person was already dead. Excerpted from Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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