Purple Hibiscus

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Goodreads).

This book was chosen by my friend Frida to bring back my reading habit. She set a schedule of how much we both can read daily and at the end of the day, we did a short review of how the story was so far (also known as buddy reading). Thanks a lot Frida!

The story is different from other books I have read such that when I finished it, it left me in an ahem okay? state. The story is about a fifteen-year-old girl from a wealthy household in Nigeria. She has a very powerful, dictator-like, religious father. She describes a few events from her life like her experience in her aunt’s poor home, political issues in Nigeria etc.

The story and flow of reading was smooth. Tolerating a few unnecessarily exhaustive review of trees, houses etc. the sentences were crisp and to the point. It talked about a lot of social topics like politics, money, corruption etc. I liked how they are told from the narrator’s perspective.

To me, the plot itself felt incomplete. It felt like, instead of reading a full story, you skip a few chapters before and after the climax. The main character in the book is the narrator’s father. Throughout the book, the narrator has a love-hate relationship towards him, making every move wondering what would father think if I do X?. Given how important the father character is, the story didn’t fill all the missing pieces about him.

Then as we reach the end-of-the-book, we have to keep wondering what the climax will be like because the plot is going in a different direction. And suddenly you get the climax. The climax was super lame. But given how the story was written in a diaryish feel, I think the lame climax is acceptable as that’s how things happen in reality.

I’m not a fan of mixing languages. The story had a lot of short Igbo phrases. For a few, you could understand their meaning from the context but for others it felt distracting.

To summarize, the book was nice, the story was good enough. But it is just my perspective-based opinion. If you see the story as a short extraction of chapters from the narrator’s diary, then it is good. But if you, like me, wanted the story to give more details regarding the father and his different masks to world, then you might be disappointed.