Purple Hibiscus
It portrays Kambili Achike, a 15 year old Nigerian teenage girl who struggles in the shadow of her father, Eugene.
Her writing style, combined with her use of Igbo description to convey characterizations and action, demonstrates her as one of the third generation of Nigerian writers.
While at Aunty Ifeoma's house, Kambili also falls in love with a young priest, Father Amadi, which awakens her sense of sexuality.
Aunty Ifeoma and her family moves to America after she is unfairly dismissed from her job as a lecturer at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka.
For example when the Achike family travels to their hometown Abba, the village women gets jealous of Jaja because as a male he will inherit his father wealth.
"[6] Adichie who is a Roman Catholic, explores issues of faith in the private and public spheres in Purple Hibiscus.
[7] Since Palm Sunday commemorates the beginning of the Holy Week in the Christian doctrine, it was used to show that a new living is coming into Eugene's family in the future.
For instance, he allowed that the Credo and Kyrie should be recited only in Latin and that the rhythmical clapping of hands should be minimal but sustained singing in Igbo, offertory songs.
In an interview with The Guardian, she mentioned that her father's strictness and her mother's quiet strength influenced her portrayal of Eugene and Beatrice Achike, the parents of Kambili in the novel.
She explored the complexities of post-colonial Nigeria, and its popularized themes such as cultural identity, class, and social change.
Adichie has cited Nigerian authors like Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta and Wole Soyinka as influences on her work.
Authors like Emecheta and Ama Ata Aidoo, who wrote about women's experiences in Africa, likely influenced Adichie's feminist perspective.
Literary agents either asks for setting to be changed from Africa to America inorder to attract familiar readers or the manuscript gets rejected instantly.
Purple Hibiscus is a sensitive and intimate story that brings a reader the innocence and delicacy of childhood, the struggle of maturing into adulthood and the blurred lines between love and hatred.
Chimamanda Adichie uses her captivating and mature style of writing to artfully endear character to readers in the intimacy of her plot twists and experiences.
[19] Literary editor of New Statesman, Jason Cowley writes that it is the best debut he's read since Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things", and Yale University lecturer Bill Broun in reviewing it calls Adichie "the 21st-century daughter of that other great Igbo novelist, Chinua Achebe.
"[22] Journalist Hephzibah Anderson of The Guardian praises Adichie's focus, writing that it "remains fixed on her heroine, enabling her to express the political in acutely personal terms, telling an intoxicating story that is at once distinctively feminine, African and universal.
"[23] Sue Arnold, in a review, praised the novel's audio narrator Adjoa Andoh's characterisation of the Kambili, whose confused love/hate relationship with her father underpins the story, is stunning.
