And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just spontaneously died and returned to life. But that didn’t matter at the moment. How was I going to get down?
-- Onyesonwu (Part 1, Chapter 3)

Importance: This quote introduces Onyesonwu’s powers of transformation and her ability to rise from the dead. Thus, it foreshadows her final resurrection or evasion of death. However, the last two sentences contextualize her abilities. While she is a powerful sorceress, she is also a child in this excerpt, leading her to dismiss the feeling of having “spontaneously died and returned to life” in favor of the more immediate concern: how to get down from the tree in which she is stuck. Here, Okorafor uses juxtaposition to briefly introduce and then distract from a major revelation. Onyesonwu’s own confusion about her experience — it is a “feeling” that she has just spontaneously died, not a certainty — makes the revelation...