MEETUP Pick: “Purple Hibiscus” Uptown Girl’s Harlem Book Club

Join the Uptown Harlem Book Club Meetup for their discussion of “Purple Hibiscus“. It’s a first person narrator Kambili Achike is a 15 year old Nigeria girl growing up in sheltered privilege in a country ravaged by political strife and personal struggle. She and her brother, Jaja, and their quiet mother, who speaks “the way a bird eats, in small amounts,” live this life of luxury because Kambili’s father is a wealthy man who owns factories, publishes a politically outspoken newspaper and outwardly leads the moral, humble life of a faithful Catholic. The many grateful citizens who have received his blessings and material assistance call him omelora, “The One Who Does for the Community”. Yet Kambili, Jaja, and their mother see a side to their provider no one else does: he is a religious fanatic who regularlybeats his family for the mildest infractions of his interpretation of an exemplary Christian life. The children know better than to discuss their home life with anyone else; “there was so Mich that we never told.” But when they are unexpectedly allowed to visit their liberated and loving Aunty Ifeoma, a widowed university professor raising three children, family secrets and tensions bubble dangerously to the surface, setting in motion a chain of events that allow Kambili to slowly blossom as she begins to question the authority of the precepts and adults once held sacred.