There are so many things to admire in Ndubuisi’s debut utilitarian children’s novel, Who Stole Uncle Chike’s Book? It is a novel written, not just to get young teenagers reading, but also to take them on a journey through the how and why of reading, just like the protagonist, Uchechi Ozioko, did in the three to five years of her life which the novel covered, while teaching the children some other life-changing lessons.
The novel opens with a 12-year-old protagonist, troubled both at home and in school. “She had lost two thousand naira at the market” she went to with her mother and the venom the mother would pour on her reveals not just the financial sorry state of her family but a whole lot of other issues disturbing the mother’s marriage with her father and thus the peace of the family. The narrator tells us that Mother’s anger was not just because of the money Uchechi lost, but because she had gotten “hardened by the burden of raising four children [Uchechi, Chibuike, Agozie and Adanna] with an unsteady business in a fluctuating economy and a husband whose income suffered many drainage pipes…” Mr. Ozioko is a shuttle driver at a university campus and we can assume that one of the “drainage pipes” attached to his income is having to constantly repair the rickety bus with which he does his business.
On the school front, Uchechi who is in her early days of JSS2 when we first meet her is facing a bully named Romarin, so feared by other students that they named him after the wrestler, Roman Reigns. The narrator explains that “school was no use to [Uchechi] if she had to face bullies every day” and a graphic account of one of the encounters Uchechi had with the bully is narrated thus:
He had once knocked her on the head to mock her too low haircut, had poked a pen at her side and said she was as thin as stock fish. He had made her kneel during morning assembly several times because he was a prefect. And he, with his prefect friends, had called her names, all during her third term in JSS1.
Faced with all these, Uchechi becomes an isolated broken kid and her academic performance wavers. She has no one to run to for protection; her elder brother Chibuike who attends The Fortress with her and normally protects her, in a youthful exuberance of detachment, leaves her to her own machinations. The management of the school too is no refuge. “The teachers did not care what happened to whoever…they flogged too much…the prefects did whatever they liked” and they have no strong school head but “an underperforming principal and an overworked vice principal.” Uchechi cannot tell all these to her mother when she is chastising her for performing poorly or even report to her father for her parents are largely inaccessible to her: an “impatient” mother and an absent father.
As Uchechi grows in the novel, her Uncle Chike too is growing in his own way. He has left the bus driver work he did with his elder brother, Uchechi’s father, and retrieved his certificate as a university graduate with which he secures a teaching job at The Sterling Academy. We first meet him in the novel as a struggling teacher, faced with the fear of having an unsuccessful transition from being a bus driver to a Literature teacher. The transition though is made easy when he becomes friends with Ademola, another Literature teacher in the school. A chance encounter with the eponymous book, which teaches how to read, in a bookstore, also helps him to make the transition seamless.
When Uncle Chike and his family visit Uchechi’s family for a holiday, an unpalatable encounter between him and Uchechi leads Uchechi to seek revenge on her uncle. That brings about the eponymous question and strains the relationship between the two families.
The irony of the conflict is that with the book in Uchechi’s hand, she gets a lifechanging encounter with the book too, just like Mr. Chike. With her new literature teacher, Mr. Jide as her guide, Uchechi puts into use the lessons she learns from Uncle Chike’s books to become an academic star for the rest of the novel. By this time also, The Fortress gets a new ownership and the new management seeks to make the school live true to its name.
Who Stole Uncle Chike’s Book? is a didactic book that does not bore as books with its same ambition almost always do. Gems of moral lessons for teenagers and even for their parents are scattered all over the pages of the novel. The book shows teenagers who may be struggling with enough motivations to study not just how quality education can help rewrite their financial and social history but also the major purpose of reading. This excerpt from one of the interactions Mr. Chike has with his students and many of such interactions between Mr. Jide and Uchechi points to this purpose.
Getting information is learning. But what has happened when you get information? You have simply received and stored. You have not given your mind any work to do. What school does for you is that it teaches you how to build your mind. How does it do that? It makes you read. And what does reading do for you? It gives your mind work to do.
The characters in Who Stole Uncle Chike’s Book? are very relatable. The reader cannot miss the affirmative nod given to girl child education in the novel through the characters of the “beloved daughters,” Uchechi and Adanna. Nor the importance of good friendship exemplified by Chike and Ademola; and Uchechi and Winnie. But what makes this book a wonderful resource to not just children but also their parents is the positive ending of the novel: the effects parents working on perfecting themselves and by extension their spousal relationships can have on their children. Learning is the ultimate champion of Ndubuisi’s debut offering, and its lessons cuts across generations.
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