[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 couple.

Eventually the couple return to Nigeria. Albert and the two children precede Kehinde, who stays behind for more than a year in an effort to sell their house in London. When she arrives in Nigeria, she discovers that Albert has taken another wife, Rike, who has given birth to one child and is pregnant with a second. Although Kehinde is the senior wife who has lived abroad, she has little status or influence in her new life. In preparing for a journey to visit her children in boarding schools, Kehinde learns just how little status she has: “Kehinde made to sit in the front seat of the Jaguar, as she had done in London, daring Rike to challenge her right to sit next to Albert. Instead, Mama Kaduna's boisterous laughter halted her. … Kehinde squeezed into the back of the car with Rike, her baby and the maid.” In addition to the humiliation of Albert's taking a second wife, Kehinde must defer to his sisters, who “take the place of honour” in his home.

Ultimately, Kehinde returns to England with a more informed perspective on the role of fond remembrances of home and on the reality of the choices in life open to African women at home and abroad. Along the way to self-awareness, she encounters many women, some of whom she judges, others of whom she cherishes, like her dead sister Taiwo, who is her twin. Significantly, Kehinde (the twin who follows behind) survives, although her mother and twin sister die. Kehinde's experiences in the womb can be read as the expression of sisterhood extending beyond familial ties.

Together we fought against the skin that kept us captive. … We communicated with each other by touch and by sounds. Sounds which only we could understand. … Frustrated, we banged and shouted; and we kicked and cried in our limited space. Exhausted, I fell asleep. I felt even in sleep the cessation of the rhythmical movements I was accustomed to. I felt around me in the now warm thickening water for my sister, but she had become just a lump of lifeless flesh. I clung to her, because she had been the only living warmth that I knew. I called to her but there was no answer. I cried for her in my now lonely tomb. … As she dried, I had more space. I grew bigger. I survived. But I did not eat my sister, as they said I did. There was only life enough for one of us.

In the acknowledgment Emecheta thanks her friends for the book's creation—with some she “spent hours debating about the so-called ‘Black women's madness.’” By turns, the reader discovers that the black woman's madness arises from her acceptance of limited choices in life as to how she is to be in the world.

Kehinde's content is important as well as engaging. Its execution, however, is uneven. Emecheta is at her best when she testifies to female experience in Africa and abroad; she is most disappointing in managing the nuances of the larger narrative.