Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really did like this book, and would have given it five stars if not for the rampant tongue-in-cheek by the author. There are so many themes in this book and so many characters with four-syllable Nigerian names, it made me wonder if the author just did a memory dump of all her experiences going back and forth between Nigeria and the US.
It's a story about first love and reclaiming one that was lost. And it's about hair, and race, and immigration, and war in Nigeria, and literature, and pop culture in the US and Nigeria, and Barack Obama...enough topics to make one's head spin. And there is the tongue-in-cheek that pops up throughout making me wonder if it's a put-down of African American culture or just a zinger to get our attention, so as to see ourselves from a new perspective.
In interviews, Adichie does say she understands where black Americans come from given our long history of slavery and Jim Crow laws, and she has come to appreciate what a black American means when he calls her "sister."
This was my first time reading one of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novels, and I will be reading more of her work.
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