I haven't read the original version of the story, but this version presents a cohesive story with very little flowery description, which is an aspect of other works of African literature that I have noticed. ( )

Buci Emechetta’s Bride Price is a hautingly beautiful novel about Aku-nna, a young Nigerian women caught in the demands of her family and of her Ibo culture.

I chose to read this book for the African Reading Challenge because I had been impressed with Emechetta’s Joys of Motherhood when I read it years ago. At first I wasn’t sure that The Bride Price was going to live up to my memory. The opening chapters were full of interesting details about life in Nigeria after World War II, but I had trouble caring about the characters. The language was too starkly simple for me. Then Emechetta describes a funeral with the rich, lyrical language I had remembered. As the mourners cried out, “The first storm of them rose like an anger thunder, in different, deafing pitches.” From then on I was carried along, fully engaged in the twists of the story and eager for her language to explode again and again into colorful imagery. Some of her descriptions relay heavily on the Nigerian experiences but are so apt that they carry meaning for all readers. For example, Emechetta describes young women, “their necks craned like those of young giraffes looking for fruits in the tops of trees.”

Read more on my blog: me, you and books
http://mdbrady.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/the-bride-price-by-buchi-emecheta/

Upper-Intermediate Early,