„"Actually, Mama, yes, I do see why. The men offered up the women because they were cowards and the worst kind of men possible. What kind of men offer up their daughters and wives to be raped in place of themselves?" Mama stared wide-eyed at me, then, very calmly, she said "Ijeoma, you're missing the point."“ (80) Ijeoma is still a child for a large part of the story, yet she has a deep belief that her love for a woman is not wrong. At the same time she is haunted by her mothers words. She reflects on the Bible not with anger (which would be completely understandable) but in a thoughtful and questioning way. „Instead, everyone nodded, and cried "Amen" after everything Father Godfrey said, and clapped, no one asking him to explain anything. (…) I looked at Mama and said „Mama, the Bible is full of stories. Maybe they're all just allegories of something else." (81)“ „I wondered about the Bible as a whole. Maybe the entire thing was just a history of a certain culture, specific to that particular time and place, which made it hard for us now to understand, and which maybe even made it not applicable for us today. (…) And Eve, different from him, woman instead of man, was simply a tool by which God noted that companionship was something you got from a person outside of yourself? What if that was all it was?“ (83) „We were naked, and we felt our nakedness as Adam and Eve must have felt it in the garden, at the time of that evening breeze.“ (125) She is angry and feels betrayed because of Amina marrying a man, then she does the same to Ndidi, but no wonder after all the pressuring of her mom: „Marriage is for everyone! Remember, a woman without a man is hardly a woman at all. Besides, good men are rare these days. Now that you've found one, you must do what you can to keep him." (223) The reason, why her mom pressures her, sees marriage and pleasing a men as the point of life, is the church, that even the husband Chibundu himself criticises: „Church just wants to do whatever it can to get as many followers as possible and to keep them under control This is the way business works.“ (232) to conform. This makes her story even more powerful, especially considering how dangerous it is to be gay in Nigeria. Ijeoma does never pity herself (which also would be fine!), she carries on and goes through a journey of denying and trying. In the end, she returns to what her instincts told her from the beginning, before the Bible lessons and the pressure and even though situation in Nigeria is horrible for gay people - and I think this is why I appreciate this book of Chinelo Okparantana so much. It isn‘t fiction, it is the real life of people that need to risk their life in order to be with their soulmate. I don‘t think it‘s necessary to add how important this topic is, beyond the beautiful writing. „Last year, a prefect found two female students making love to each other at the university in Lagos where Chidinma teaches. it happened in one of the student hostels, so Chidinma was not there to see it, or else she might have stepped in, might even have risked her own life as she did.“ (317)