The first several short stories didn't blow me away in the way I've come to expect from Adichie, so I sort of half-formulated this theory in my mind that what I really love about her is her character development and the way she can put you into a mood or emotional state without seeming to try (like the way she builds the mood of the family around the abusive father in Purple Hibiscus - spot freaking on), and maybe those traits can't be fully developed in a short story. But then I got to On Monday of Last Week and couldn't look away, couldn't slow down my reading pace, couldn't anything but adore her all over again. And then Jumping Monkey Hill made me laugh out loud twice (on the train, so this was serious stuff, not just a chuckle on the couch)

[She could not tell his age from his face; it was pleasant but unformed, as though God, having created him, had slapped him flat against a wall and smeared his features all over his face. and

The next day at breakfast, Isabel used just such a tone when she sat next to Ujunwa and said that surely, with that exquisite bone structure, Ujunwa had to come from Nigerian royal stock. The first thing that came to Ujunwa's mind was to ask if Isabel ever needed royal blood to explain the good looks of friends back in London. She did not ask that but instead said -- because she could not resist -- that she was indeed a princess and came from an ancient lineage and that one of her forebears had captured a Portuguese trader in the seventeenth century and kept him, pampered and oiled, in a royal cage. She stopped to sip her cranberry juice and smile into her glass.:]

before it made me so righteously indignant I could spit and so angry I almost started crying (but, this time the fact that I was on the train kept me in check).

And the hits kept coming after that. So the moral of this review is: my love affair with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie continues apace, for those keeping track at home.