Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – 589 pages
Book Blurb:
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. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland.
My Review: 3.5 stars
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Here I go again, swimming against the tide, but I don’t agree with The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Goodreads, and even Entertainment Weekly that this was the best book or top read of 2014. But please don’t get me wrong; I did enjoy this book. What I liked is that this author took an important topic, race, and with fiction as her vessel, discussed immigration, emigration, black Americans versus black non-Americans, interracial relationships, defining your ethnicity versus your race, is home where you live or where you come from and how Americans, Europeans, black and white, view these issues. Then add the bookends of this novel, a good and slightly scandalous love story on top off all the other topics and like me, you may be out of breath. And that’s where the book fell short for me. It was just too much of every character in the book addressing these issues, which I felt was overkill. I agree that the writing was excellent and Adichi has an incredibly rich vocabulary, however I found myself skipping some pages as some of the highfalutin opinions became exhausting. Thanks to my mother in law the Lincolnwood Library in Illinois for a sheet of how to pronounce all the names and countries as well as providing a map.
Quotes I Liked:
Why did people ask “What is it about?” as if a novel had to be about only one thing.”
-“How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.”
-“I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters.”
-It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.”
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