Meet the Prices: Adah Trivia Quiz

Answer: Palindromes

Adah has the most colourful and poetic voice of the four sisters, and loves playing with words. She reads books back to front and often thinks in palindromes, which are words or phrases that are spelled the same forwards and backwards (such as 'poor Dan is in a droop'). During church services, she mentally sings palindromic phrases to hymns such as 'Amazing Grace'.

She also prefers to spell her name without the letter H. Both she and Leah are gifted, but their father does not believe in further education for girls.

Answer: She was eaten by a lion.

Orleanna sends Leah and Adah into the forest to fetch water. She often comes home alone due to being slower than Leah, but is used to walking alone; unknown to Orleanna, she has been following Methuselah, the parrot left behind by a previous tenant. Adah feels she is being followed and arrives home late; while this is going on, Tata Ndu reports to the Price family that Adah had been eaten by a lion, seeing blood and assuming it was hers, but it turns out to be a bushbuck.

At this point, Adah reveals herself. Nathan punishes both twins by making them write out the chapter on Cain and Abel.

Answer: After being punished at Sunday School

Although Adah almost never speaks, she asked her Sunday School teacher at the age of five whether G-d would really condemn children to eternal suffering just for being born in the wrong place and not being baptised. Her teacher punished her by making her kneel on grains of rice while praying for Adah's soul. When Adah got up from the floor, she realised that she no longer believed in G-d. She also points out that in Kikongo, the inflection of a word can change its meaning; in church, they call G-d 'Tata Nzolo', meaning 'Most Beloved Father', but 'nzolo' can also be a type of miniature potato or a grub used for bait.

One major conflict in Kilanga is the conflict between Christianity, as preached by Nathan Price, and the local folk religion, which is polytheistic. Nelson worries that the Prices have brought rain upon the village by angering the local gods, and by the fact that Leah and Adah are twins (or 'báza'), as it is customary for mothers to abandon their twin babies in the forest.

Answer: Emily Dickinson

Adah quotes Emily Dickinson (or, as she calls her, 'No Snikcidy Lime') throughout the book. When Ruth May dies, Adah quotes 'Because I could not stop for Death'. She identifies strongly with Dickinson because of Dickinson's reclusive personality and the fact that they both 'liked themselves best in darkness'.

She also identifies with the line 'tell the truth, but tell it slant', because of her hemiplegia causing her to walk with a slant. Adah is a huge reader in general, quoting 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' and passing it off as a Bible verse, and 'Ariel's Song' from Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' after Nathan's death.

Answer: Emory

After Ruth May's death, Orleanna finally has enough, and she and her surviving daughters abandon Kilanga, following a group of women heading to Bulungu. While Eeben Axelroot takes Rachel to South Africa and Leah stays with Anatole, Orleanna and Adah are given a lift by a truck driver, only for him to abandon them, and they have to walk for two days before being picked up by soldiers and left at the Belgian Embassy. They are taken back to the USA on a UN hospital plane after receiving intensive treatment for various parasites and diseases.

As Adah and Orleanna can no longer live in their old house without Nathan, they move into a shack outside Bethlehem and Adah applies to go to Emory and study medicine. When she has an admissions interview, she finally speaks and passes all her entrance exams, as well as showing off her incredible mathematical skills.

Answer: Because Adah was the youngest daughter

On Christmas Eve, Adah is working in a hospital on a neo-natal unit, where a set of triplets die, and it makes her wonder why Orleanna chose her and not one of the other girls to take back home. She had previously recalled how Orleanna took Ruth May with her first when the ants attacked Kilanga. She phones Orleanna at midnight and Orleanna explains why: after Ruth May's death, Adah was the youngest of the surviving children, and Orleanna wanted to take care of her children 'from the bottom up'. Adah does not interpret this as a question of worth; she realises her mother needs her.

It is also worth noting that Rachel had planned to marry Eeben Axelroot to get herself out of having to marry Tata Ndu, and Leah had Anatole to look after her and was more self-sufficient than Adah.

Answer: A type of bird

'Benduka' is a derogatory nickname for Adah, which the villagers call her because of her disability, but because of the way Kikongo works, she knows that if pronounced differently (as 'Bënduka'), it means a type of swallow with curved wings. Adah goes to see a neurologist, who trains her to walk normally by learning to walk all over again.

It is also revealed that she does not have hemiplegia as everyone thought; dragging her right side is merely a habit she picked up in childhood and never stopped.

Although Adah can walk normally, she misses 'Ada', the person she used to be, and reading becomes dull to her because she can no longer read books back to front.

Answer: For being slow

The verse which Adah had to write out is 2 Maccabees 13:4. 2 Maccabees is one of the books of the Apocrypha, meaning that it is not accepted as official canon by all denominations of Christianity; it is accepted by Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians (Nathan himself is Southern Baptist, but is a believer in the Apocrypha). Adah considers it to be oddly appropriate considering the manner of Nathan's death; the verse talks about a man being executed by being pushed to his death from a tower. According to Leah, Nathan was chased by a group of Congolese villagers, who blamed him for the deaths of several children killed by a crocodile. He climbed up a former colonial watchtower, which the villagers set on fire, and ended up being burned alive. The villagers left him to die and be eaten by wild animals.

The verse concludes with 'so this will be the end', which Adah quotes. Leah asks why she had to do that verse so many times, as Leah herself never got it, and Adah says it was punishment for being slow.

Answer: To remember what Nathan did to the girls

When Adah comes back from Africa, she passes on Leah's news about Nathan's death. Orleanna does not particularly care about Nathan's death, asking what it could possibly mean to her now, and also tells Adah that when she got back to the USA, nobody asked about Ruth May's death. The people she worked with on humanitarian aid and civil rights campaigns also said nothing about Ruth May, or about Orleanna's marriage to Nathan.

Orleanna's own viewpoint chapters show that she regrets her marriage to Nathan, not least because of his cruelty to both her and the children, but she was too worn out emotionally to leave him and feels guilty about it. He is both physically and mentally abusive to her, breaking a dish she loves and accusing her of flirting with Anatole by cooking for him, and hitting her when she is happy about being pregnant. He is also frequently violent to the girls; at one point, he beats both Rachel and the twins for not cooking dinner in time. Adah confesses to Orleanna that she hated how Nathan made fun of her reading and writing, and how he hit them, especially Orleanna. She fantasised about dousing the bed in kerosene and setting it alight with Nathan in it, but could not kill Orleanna too. Her other reason for not killing Orleanna is that killing her would be setting her free, and Adah doesn't want that; she wants Orleanna to remember what Nathan did to her and her sisters.

Answer: Editions of books with misprints

In the epilogue, Adah is a doctor, specialising in tropical and infectious diseases, and parasites. She views diseases as one of nature's ways of cleansing itself, and viruses as relations and pets. Orleanna is now living on an island and Adah goes to visit her from time to time, although they don't talk much. She plays chess and watches the odd film with a disabled colleague who is in a wheelchair due to polio, though they both find the cinema overwhelming.

Because of Adah's fascination with language, she gets into the habit of collecting editions of the Bible and other books that have misprints, such as a verse confusing 'camels' with 'damsels'. This edition is known as the 'Camel Bible'. Part of the reason for this is because of her father's habit of declaring, "Tata Jesus is bängala!" 'Bängala' means 'precious and dear', but it also means the poisonwood tree, which Nathan encounters early on during his failed attempts at gardening. Adah calls her father's interpretation of the Bible 'the Poisonwood Bible'.