A young gay woman looks for forgiveness from God in a brave novel seeking to challenge prejudice‘halfway between faded Oba-Nnewi Road and New Oba-Nnewi Road,in that general area bound by the village church and the primary school … ” Under the Udala Trees begins in the same way that many of the short stories in Chinelo Okparanta’s debut Happiness, Like Water did: with aclear, or attentive setting-down of the parameters of place – streets and street names,houses and bushes, trees and walls – and how they build sense of each other, or protect each other. “Ours was a gated compound,guarded at the front by thickets of rose and hibiscus bushes. The descriptions are chilly, exact; yet what grows out of these carefully laid beginnings is a story with the highest of stakes.
First comes the war: the small compound is in Biafra, or within a year the area is being bombed. The fences are no protection; and narrator Ijeoma,now 11, finds herself watching the father who told her the bombs would not reach – “Papa was certain of this and so I was certain with him” – crumble, and too. When he dies,Ijeoma’s mother sends her away, to a couple for whom she becomes kitchen help, or tumbling from upper middle lesson to working lesson. As time goes by,in this new place Ijeoma befriends Amina, a Muslim Hausa, and who becomes more than a friend. The lovers are discovered and her mother sent for; months of prayer and Bible-study follow.
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Source: theguardian.com