NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic about star-crossed lovers that explores questions of race and being Black in America—and the search for what it means to call a place home. • From the award-winning author of We Should All Be Feminists and Half of a Yellow Sun • WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR "An expansive, epic love story."—O, The Oprah Magazine
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be Black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post–9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.
At once powerful and tender, Americanah is a remarkable novel that is "dazzling…funny and defiant, and simultaneously so wise." —San Francisco Chronicle
This book was... I don't know how to capture it. It's more social commentary than a novel. And a lot of the commentary is spot-on, but as a novel, the book seems very disjointed.
Maybe because I'm reading it in 2017, the race-in-America commentary didn't have much of an effect on me - the Non-American Black distinctions were interesting though. What I did like quite a bit was post-colonial Lagos of their childhood, and the drudgery of choicelessness. How they long to move away and make something of themselves. The immigrant anxieties resonated well with me - possibly because these are questions that are on my mind currently.
Ifemelu is a sharp observer of the world around her, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out her own motivations, what drove her in life, her decisions, her flights of fancy. Her character suffered from being straitjacketed to fit around the social commentary. Obinze's character didn't have that prominent component of commentary, and his character suffered for it.
I found Adichie's prose to be quite fluid though, which will get me to read her other books. I'd like to see how she does when she doesn't have the fit in a lot of commentary.
