The Bride Price

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Bride Price is the poignant love story of Aku-nna, a young Igbo woman, and her teacher, Chike, the son of a prosperous former slave. As their tribe begins to welcome western education and culture, these two are drawn together despite the traditions that forbid them to marry. Aku-nna flees an unwanted and forced marriage to join Chike, only to have her uncle refuse the required bride price from her lover's family. Frustrated and abandoned by their people, Aku-naa and Chike escape to a modern world unlike any they've ever experienced. Despite their joy, Aku-nna is plagued by the fear the she will die in childbirth--the fate, according to tribal lore, awaiting every young mother whose bride price is left unpaid.

This second edition includes a new introduction by Dr. Marie Linton Umeh, author of Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta (Africa World Press).

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Booklist Review

The tragic story of a modern Nigerian girl, Akunna, who rebels against traditional marriage customs and elopes with the schoolmaster she loves. (Mr 15 76)

Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.