The theme of truth covering the subtopics: honesty, courage, bravery, corruption.

Throughout the despondency of their mother’s death and the subsequent difficulties of both remaining children, Sade and Femi maintain hope that this sadness will not last forever as well as that their family will someday return to Nigeria and begin their lives anew. They rationalize their fears and changes in the hope of recapturing some semblance of who they were before.

Despite the clarity and immediacy of violence and danger immediately after their mother’s death, Sade and Femi somewhat refuse to acknowledge this truth until they are directly confronted by it. They seem hopeful that they will not have to leave Nigeria, reacting with profound sadness and confusion when their father tells them that they must move to England. For Sade, this hope is misguided as it relates to the loss of herself as she moves further away from Femi while still trying to maintain a hold on her Nigerian heritage. However, the desperation she endures during this period of trying to hold herself together as well as support Femi appears to have strengthened her hope for and belief in the possibility of a family reunion, leading her to ignore any warning signs. Throughout the novel, Sade’s sentiment and conception of hope does begin to change as she realizes how much of her hope was tied up in returning to exactly the way of life had before. When she begins to mature, she realizes that although she may be able to see her father again and repair her relationship with Femi, she will never be exactly the same young girl without her mother’s influence. Initially, it may be argued that her idea of hope rests entirely on her father and the stability he offered, and that much of the difficulty she experiences is due to the immense destruction of her normalized landscape. She focuses almost entirely on how she will never be able to see him again. She begins to gain a more nuanced view of her hope that she will return to being a different, but still acceptable, version of herself in England until it is possible to return to Nigeria. When Sade begins to understand that the loss of her relationship with her mother has changed her own identity an incredible amount as well as damaging the relationship she has with her brother, she becomes less hopeful that she will ever be able to return to the concept of the life she enjoyed before, a difficult but necessary transition she must make.

This theme throughout the novel contributes to a greater contextualization of the role of the individual within their family structure and how inextricably the individual is linked to the family structure. Naidoo may have chosen to portray the theme of hope this way in order to comment on the profound fears that one may lose the self while they also lose their hope.