The Bride Price - Tapa blanda

An artless story about a young Nigerian girl who has to leave Lagos and go back to her mother's family village after her father dies. There she and her young schoolteacher fall in love, but she is kidnapped into marrying someone else, and a scandal arises from the lies she tells her kidnapper about her loss of virginity in order to escape him. Nevertheless her lover rescues her and they live happily until she dies in childbirth, confirming the tradition that a dowryless bride will not survive. Emecheta as in Second-Class Citizen (1975), explicitly fills in her lessons about the clash between modernization and tribal residues in the 1950's. Particular twists crop up when it is a WWII wound that kills the girl's father, and an Esso-built hut that the young couple is so delighted to move into. But the book remains a fairy tale, written with a certain genuine sweetness, offering nothing that would disturb - or especially challenge - an adolescent reader. (Kirkus Reviews)