Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015)
Chinelo Okparanta’s novel Under the Udala Trees opens with a vivid depiction of Nigeria’s civil war through the eyes of coming-of-age protagonist Ijeoma. A child at the war’s beginning in 1967, Ijeoma is sent by her mother to live with a grammar-school teacher and his wife under the assumption she will be safer with them. The circumstances of this foster care arrangement are fairly grim, and yet Ijeoma’s relative good fortune is thrown into sharp relief through the images of warfare around her: decapitated bodies flanking streets, starving children with swollen bellies, a still-live boy rising in shock from a pile of corpses.
