Review by Booklist Review
Adichie portrays four women united by culture, geopolitics, immigration, sexism, trauma, and longing in her first novel since Americanah (2013). Chiamaka is a freelance travel writer stymied by COVID-19. Her wealthy family is in Nigeria, while she's in the U.S. "flooded by regret" as she reflects on her relationships with men and how they failed to live up to her dream of a "merging of souls." Her closest friend, successful lawyer Zikora, is desperate to have a child and baffled by her inability to find a husband. Brainy and tough banker Omelogor, Chiamaka's "closest cousin," battles her way to the epicenter of power in Abuja, where she turns corruption into a force for good. She then changes course, enrolls in grad school in the U.S., and launches an acidly funny sex advice website, For Men Only. Adichie electrifies her depictions of each character with stinging details and lacerating social critiques to striking, hilarious, and heartbreaking effect, the latter reaching a crescendo in the particularly riveting tale of Kadiatou. After horrific suffering, Kadiatou finds contentment working as Chiamaka's housekeeper and then as a hotel maid, until an international "VIP" rapes her and nearly destroys her life, a crime Adichie based, with outrage and empathy, on a true-life story. Every aspect of this transfixing, intimate, and astute group portrait is ablaze with scorching insights into the maddening absurdities and injustices that continue to plague women's lives.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Adichie's magnificently vital, sharply forthright novel will be one of the year's most sought after and resounding titles.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Adichie (Americanah) returns to fiction after more than a decade with this superb tale of the fleeting joys and abiding disappointments of four African women on both sides of the Atlantic. It begins with Chiamaka, a Maryland-based travel writer from Nigeria who recounts her history of failed romances while laid up during the Covid-19 lockdown. Adichie then turns to Chiamaka's best friend Zikora, a pregnant Washington, D.C., lawyer who's determined to celebrate achieving her long-held dream of motherhood even though her husband has just left her. The next section follows Chiamaka's cousin Omelogor, who leaves her job at a corrupt bank in Abuja, Nigeria, for an MBA program in the U.S., hoping to discover the part of herself that is "noble and good." She's bewildered by all the "perfect righteous American liberals" in her program, including a classmate who accuses her of Islamophobia for sharing the story of her uncle's murder by anti-Christian militants, and her disenchantment turns to rage. Most heartbreakingly, Chiamaka's Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou, is sexually assaulted by a prominent French economist and politician at her hotel cleaning job, and the case draws scrutiny on her after it receives international notoriety. Adichie riffs brilliantly on what feminism means to her characters and renders each woman's story in a distinctive voice--Omelogor's rants in particular provide a thrilling contrast to the cool autofiction of Chiamaka's sections. This is well worth the wait. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Four Nigerian women are poised at emotional crossroads that compel them to scrutinize their lives. Isolated by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Chiamaka, a novelist-turned--travel writer sheltering in suburban Maryland, is struggling to stave off boredom and loneliness through regular Zoom calls with family and friends in the U.S., Europe, and her native Nigeria. It's not enough, and soon this professional tourist resorts to filling the empty spaces of time with mental excursions through the ruins of past love affairs beginning with Darnell, "the Denzel Washington of academia," whose magnetism created waiting lists for his art history classes and had Chiamaka looking past his personal slights--for a while, anyway. Then there was Chuka, a more considerate and less mercurial man who shared both her African homeland and an address in the Washington, D.C., area. Nothing wrong there besides what Chia characterizes as "that exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person that you do not love." As in her previous works of fiction--most recentlyAmericanah (2013)--Adiche makes her prose hum and throb with elegantly wrought and empathetic observations. This style extends into the stories of three other Nigerian women in Chia's life. Zikora, her best friend, is a tough-minded attorney accustomed to speaking brutal truths to others but vulnerable to ill-starred love affairs with men she thinks of as "thieves of time," one of whom leaves her while she's pregnant, forcing her to raise a child alone--though not without unexpected help. Kadiatou, Chia's housekeeper, has overcome challenging odds in raising her gifted daughter, Binta, by herself in America, but is the innocent victim of a sordid scandal that jeopardizes her future. And Chia's cousin, the glamorous, self-possessed Omelogor, is a formidable presence in Nigerian finance but prone to melancholy, rumination, and regret. In today's world, when people seem at once too cut off and too much in each other's business, readers will feel communion with these tense, put-upon, yet resilient women in crisis. Adichie weaves stories of heartbreak and travail that are timely, touching, and trenchant. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
