Buchi Emecheta Critical Essay | Critical Review by Adele S. Newson

Critical Review by Adele S. Newson

SOURCE: A review of Kehinde, in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 3, Summer, 1994, p. 867.

In the following review, Newson offers tempered praise for Kehinde.

Buchi Emecheta's latest novel, Kehinde, is a study of cultural traditions, adaptation, and transculturation, of how and when an adopted country becomes home. It is, in short, about choices of how to be in the world.

Kehinde Okolo is thirty-five years old, married with two children, and employed in a management position at Barclays Bank when the story opens. Her husband Albert is a forty-year-old shopkeeper who is intent on returning to Nigeria, where he hopes to be made a chief in his homeland. The couple have been living in England for some eighteen years and have managed to eke out a comfortable existence, but pressures from Albert's sisters in Nigeria and midlife pulls conspire to disrupt the current life of the...
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