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“Readers will find a poignant, memorable voice they’ll feel lucky to have met.”—Harper’s Bazaar (Best Summer Beach Reads of 2023)
Soila is a lucky girl by anyone’s estimation. Raised by her stern, conservative mother and a chorus of aunts, she has lived a protected life in Nairobi. Soila is headstrong and outspoken, and she chafes against her mother’s strict rules. After a harrowing assault by a trusted family friend, she flees to New York for college, vowing never to return home.
New York in the 1990s is not what Soila imagined it would be. Instead of finding a golden land of opportunity, Soila is shocked by the entitlement of her wealthy American classmates and the poverty she sees in the streets. She befriends a Black American girl at school and witnesses the insidious racism her friend endures, forcing Soila to begin to acknowledge the legacy of slavery and the blind spots afforded by her Kenyan upbringing. When she falls in love with a free-spirited artist, a man her mother would never approve of, she must decide whether to honor her Kenyan identity and what she owes to her family, or to follow her heart and forge a life of her own design.
Lucky Girl is a fierce and tender debut about the lives and loves we choose—what it meant to be an African immigrant in America at the turn of the millennium, and how a young woman finds a place for herself in the world.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 2, 2023 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780593133927
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780593133927
- File size: 4246 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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April 1, 2023
A young Kenyan woman in New York City faces an identity crisis while coming to recognize how issues of race, culture, and religion are different for Black Americans than for Black Africans. As a teen in Nairobi, Soila chafes at her rigid upbringing as the privileged daughter of a wealthy, widowed businesswoman depicted as painfully complex. Despite financial success, Mother has not recovered emotionally since her husband's suicide years ago. Her extreme version of Catholicism requires that she regularly self-flagellate. An authoritarian unable to accept vulnerability in herself or others, she conveys love to Soila only through strict overprotectiveness. Cowed yet inwardly rebellious, Soila expresses herself in photography, aware that her mother will never let her pursue it seriously. Without her mother's knowledge, she applies to American colleges and is accepted at Barnard. Unfortunately, when Soila asks her mother's beloved priest to help her break the news, he molests her. The shame weighs her down until she finally opens up to her first New York boyfriend. Half Black Kenyan, half White American, he criticizes Soila's judgmental attitude toward Black Americans and educates her on the "cycle of poverty" she has blithely ignored. Similarly, her best college friend teaches Soila to recognize her privilege as a rich Kenyan with a British accent by explaining America's systemic racism in discussions that veer into the heavy-handed--was anyone really using the term white fragility in the 1990s? Most interesting when she tries to sort out her attitudes, Soila can be wearying as a narrator, often letting readers know how exceptionally smart, pretty, talented, and beloved she is. By 2001, Soila has graduated, eschewed photography to work in finance as her mother expects, and has a Black American lover her mother knows nothing about. But then comes the tragedy of Sept. 11 and a visit from her mother, causing Soila to reexamine what she really wants and where she fits. A thought-provoking exploration of the complicated experience of an African woman in America.COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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