Americanah centers on a love story between Ifemelu, beautiful and outspoken, and Obinze, self-assured and thoughtful. They fall head over heals for each other as teenagers in troubled Nigeria, still under military dictatorship. Constant strikes put strain on the educational system so Ifemelu heads to college in the United States while Obinze stays in Africa. In the States, Ifemelu deals with culture shock, isolation, and depression. Eventually she starts a successful blog where she writes about race from the perspective of a non-American black person. […]
This should have just been a TED Talk.
Edit to add: I have no idea why all my paragraphs are messed up below! Sorry! I just didn’t really care for this book. I know. I’m sorry. I wanted to like it. Everyone else loves it! I tried. There were whole sections I liked a lot! I love her other books! But at the end, I put it down and felt like I’d just finished my assigned reading for an undergraduate course on racism in America. Not in a “wow, what a thought-provoking novel!” kind of way. […]
Americanah
Last year I read Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which is a brilliant fictionalized portrayal of Nigeria before and during the civil war, and was blown away by both the story and her writing. Once I heard she had this new book out, I put myself on the 70-person wait list for Americanah and finally picked it up last Friday. Americanah is about a young woman named Ifemelu who grows up in Nigeria and due to the multiple strikes at her […]