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psocopteraWhile We Run is the sequel to Karen Healey's When We Wake, and I really wish I knew whether it *was* A Sequel or the middle book of A YA Trilogy. Maybe that sounds bad but I actually like that it could be either; I just wish I knew! I like Karen Healey a lot - I think she's doing a lot of worthwhile things with her books, the kind of thing where you read some other book and say "why can't somebody write something that fails less on this front" and Healey is doing it. And she tells a good story. (For people who have read the first one, this one is from Abdi's point of view, and Healey does a good job of giving him his own perspective and voice that are very different than Tegan's, as far as I recall from the first book.)
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is literary fiction, which if you've been reading my book reviews for awhile you may recall is Not My Thing, but every so often I figure it's good for me to pop my head out of the genre gopher hole, and I had read some essay or talk-transcript or something by Adichie (I think her Ted talk about "The Danger of a Single Story") and thought she had interesting things to say. And in fact I mostly liked this book. I liked the main character Ifmelu and the slow way we come to really understand the central choice of the book (her decision to move back to Lagos from the US) and Adichie makes a lot of very sharp observations about race and the differences in what it means to be African American or American African and the ways well-meaning white people are annoying about African-ness and I would recommend the book to people who think these sound like interesting topics. (What I did not much like was the main relationship, which was sort of too bad as I think the book was supposed to be partly a love story between these two people, and I am just not so into romantic relationships in literary fiction with all their realism (heartbreak, cheating, dissatisfaction and disagreements ... I don't know, meh). I like romance novels, okay? Also Ifmelu's narration makes "with other men she saw the ceiling" (that is, the sex wasn't as good) the theme of the relationship (although the book shows that there's more to it than that) and I'm sorry, but for me that's one step up from Ayla having the only Womanly Cave that fits Jondalar's massive Paleolithic Stone Tool as a reason to like the relationship.)
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is literary fiction, which if you've been reading my book reviews for awhile you may recall is Not My Thing, but every so often I figure it's good for me to pop my head out of the genre gopher hole, and I had read some essay or talk-transcript or something by Adichie (I think her Ted talk about "The Danger of a Single Story") and thought she had interesting things to say. And in fact I mostly liked this book. I liked the main character Ifmelu and the slow way we come to really understand the central choice of the book (her decision to move back to Lagos from the US) and Adichie makes a lot of very sharp observations about race and the differences in what it means to be African American or American African and the ways well-meaning white people are annoying about African-ness and I would recommend the book to people who think these sound like interesting topics. (What I did not much like was the main relationship, which was sort of too bad as I think the book was supposed to be partly a love story between these two people, and I am just not so into romantic relationships in literary fiction with all their realism (heartbreak, cheating, dissatisfaction and disagreements ... I don't know, meh). I like romance novels, okay? Also Ifmelu's narration makes "with other men she saw the ceiling" (that is, the sex wasn't as good) the theme of the relationship (although the book shows that there's more to it than that) and I'm sorry, but for me that's one step up from Ayla having the only Womanly Cave that fits Jondalar's massive Paleolithic Stone Tool as a reason to like the relationship.)
