Lucky Girl

A Novel

Cover Art for 9780593133903, Lucky Girl by Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu
ISBN: 9780593133903
Publisher: Random House Group
Published: 16 May, 2023
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Links
Editions:
2 other editions of this product

A privileged young Kenyan woman flees the expectations of her mother for a life in New York that challenges all her beliefs about race, love, and family in this rich and engaging debut.Since I was a child I had been searching for a place where I could just be me. It wasn’t at home in Kenya with Mother. Then I came to a foreign land, which I loved, but I was still a stranger. I was different, even to the people with whom I shared a skin color and hair texture. I worried I would never find the place where I belonged.Soila is a lucky girl by anyone’s estimation. Raised by her stern, conservative mother and a chorus of aunts, she has lived a life of privilege 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 she imagined it would be. Instead of a golden land of opportunity, Soila finds herself 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 acts of racism her friend endures, forcing Soila to begin to acknowledge the legacy of slavery and the blind spots afforded by the privilege of 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.

Booko is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more

Shop Preferences

Customize which shops to display. You can include the following shops by logging in to change your settings.

Booko is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more

Historical Prices

Loading...
This graph is for informational purposes only. Occasionally pricing data is captured incorrectly, through bugs in Booko or the stores supplying data, which may distort the graph, providing undue hope that even lower prices sometimes appear.

Recently Updated