Book: Americanah
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Pages: 477
How Long it Took Me To Read: 4 days or so.
Plot Summary: From the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, a dazzling new novel: a story of love and race centered around a young man and woman from Nigeria who face difficult choices and challenges in the countries they come to call home.
As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are leaving the country if they can. Ifemelu—beautiful, self-assured—departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze—the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor—had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.
Years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their shared passion—for their homeland and for each other—they will face the toughest decisions of their lives.
Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today’s globalized world: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s most powerful and astonishing novel yet.
{This is a slightly different and difficult book to review in the usual way that I do. Splitting it up based on characters, things I liked and didn't. Therefore, I will just generally talk about the book as a whole.}
General Thoughts and Review:
This is the third book by Adichie that I've read..this year alone. I've liked both of her other books, a short-story collection and a full length novel. This book I've had some issues with. The blurb on the back of the book says it's a story of young love and lovers reuniting years later. Now, I didn't expect a mushy love story or anything like that. A writer of Adichie's caliber will not really write a pure and simple love story. Still I was disappointed that the focus of this book was Race and Racism. Solely and wholly this was a book about Racism. Not that it wasn't interesting to read about what it's like to be black in America. This book was a eye-opening look at what it's like to be discriminated against based on your skin colour. I didn't know it was so bad, so open and so omnipresent in American society.
I am brown and know several friends and family who've moved to the US and even gone there on holiday and none of them have come back with similar stories. In fact, several, if not most of them have told stories of lovely, warm and welcoming people. Maybe they were just lucky and maybe it's different to be black. I don't know...friends and family in the UK have had instances of racism and hate and have been shaken by the experience.
Being about such a difficult topic the book was in certain parts a difficult read. I put it down a couple of times, because I didn't like the world I was being pulled into. Nothing but the very good writing could being me back to the book. If a less gifted writer had written this book, I would quit it 100 pages in.
Also I just didn't like our female lead Ifemelu at ALL! She was annoying. Plain and simple. It was an instant dislike towards her and nothing she did or said made me like her. And she is our focus for most of the book and I didn't really like being stuck with her for most part.
We saw very little of Obinze and I wish there was more of his life. I really liked him and his mother.
I have realized that I love the writing, the stories and the plot of most of Adichie's books but I dislike her lead characters. I know they are meant to be real, flawed and human but I just don't like them.
I struggled with reading this book and as much as I enjoyed the writing, as a whole this was a disappointing read. I still want to read more from the author but I will give it some time before I pick up more of her work.
Rating: 2/5
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