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rachelrreads 's review for:
Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This is a sweeping, lovely novel about Ifemelu and her first love Obinze, who she meets at university. Though the novel is mainly told from Ifemelu's POV (always in third person), it alternates between her experience in America and Obinze's experience in England...before the two make their way back to Nigeria. I appreciated that Ifemelu's experience as an outsider in America allowed me to view my American identity through an anthropological lens, and it was interesting to see her experience her Blackness for the first time in a way she didn't back home. Once she'd been settled in America for a few years, though, I found it improbable that she almost instantly could make a living through her blog about race in America. Adichie includes a lot of Ifemelu's blog posts in the text, and I also thought they were extremely on the nose.
I didn't think the book needed to be 588 pages. Adichie's prose is generally easy to read, though sometimes her language is flowery and the book's vocabulary unnecessarily esoteric. The book was mainly well paced, surprising given its length, but I think the last 200 pages or so started to drag — particularly because the book's conclusion felt inevitable, and after a point, I was really ready to reach that inevitable conclusion.
I didn't think the book needed to be 588 pages. Adichie's prose is generally easy to read, though sometimes her language is flowery and the book's vocabulary unnecessarily esoteric. The book was mainly well paced, surprising given its length, but I think the last 200 pages or so started to drag — particularly because the book's conclusion felt inevitable, and after a point, I was really ready to reach that inevitable conclusion.