"The Reluctant American"...

...This was the title of the review of Americanah on The Wall Street Journal. It was quite an interesting review of the book. http://t.co/hfYAANyVqF I recently read the book (thanks Sissy poo for the free books :D) and...First and foremost, it was an interesting read. I had a great time reading it. The major character, Ifemelu was a girl many girls could identify with. At least with one thing about her. There was where she told her Mum about her friend and the Mum automatically assumed the said friend was a 'she' when she was actually talking about a male friend. LOL. I could relate with that.  Moving on. I felt like there were so many characters and it became a chore to catch up with some of  them. Sometimes along the book, a name would be mentioned and I would have to actually pause to recollect who the character was.

The weird thing about the book was that at a point, you would think Ifemelu-the main character- was the author of the book. It didn't help that everybody but Ifemelu was put down somehow, while Ifemelu seemed like a perfect woman. I think Chimamanda had a hard time separating her feelings from Ifemelu's so somewhere along the line you were bound to think Chimamanda was doing the talking or maybe you were caught in the web of both of them. It didn't help that Chimamanda has so much in common with Ifemelu; they both left their Universities in Nigeria to start afresh in the United States, both schooled in Philadephia, both of them have natural hair and share a common hatred for relaxers. I wondered why someone would hate relaxers so much and in fact paused my reading to tweet about it. Someone replied me, "I think she used Ifemelu to abundantly register her own reservations"