Coming of age, cultural challenges and the harsh realities of adulthood are beautifully articulated in the book Lucky Girl by Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu.
Soila is a teenage Kenyan girl living a privileged life in Nairobi as the only daughter of an over-protective and aloof mother.
Her father died when she was five years old, in circumstances never properly explained to her. Since becoming a widow, Soila’s mother spends much of her time and money on church affairs, when she is not running the biscuit company owned by her late husband.
By all standards, Soila is a fortunate child, brought up to be a good Christian girl guided by a regime of hard work and modest living.
Yet, she longs for birthday parties like other children of wealthy families. She would love to hear stories of her mother’s childhood, to receive a hug and a kiss, instead of the “strange silence that barricaded her from me.”
A doting housemaid fills in the emotional gap and she finds solace in a hobby of photography as the desire to leave home grows with time. Soila’s grandmother and three aunts also live with them and they, at least, fill the house with cheerfulness when her stern mother is not at home.
An incident of sexual assault by somebody close to the family reinforces Soila’s determination to study abroad. She applies to universities in the US secretly as her mother is against the idea. Arriving in the US in the late 1990s marks the beginning of independence and liberation from a suffocating upbringing. Student life in New York city is the starting point of Soila finding herself and the courage to live life on her terms.
She meets a charismatic medical student called Alex, the mixed-race son of a well-to-do Kenyan father and American mother.
He has travelled the world and spent half his life in the US, and despite their different upbringings, Solia and Alex strike an easy friendship. It is through Alex, and her gregarious African American flatmate, Leticia, that her eyes are opened to poverty, wealth, race and the complexity of blackness in America. It surprises her that the black experience is not homogenous among people of African ancestry.
There are hilarious moments where Soila’s naivety comes face-to-face with the direct and strange American culture, tragic occasions that she must navigate alone and puzzling incidents of subtle racism. At a part-time job, some of the shop customers prefer to speak with the manager, “because they did not want to deal with a black person, and it hurt me a great deal.” Yet Soila questions to what extent she, an African immigrant, should adapt to the culture and “allow the Americans some comfort around your foreignness” as Alex advises.
Through her student years and into working life, Soila attempts to carve her place in the world. She discovers love, and it is her Ghanaian artist boyfriend who encourages her to pursue her notable talent for photography. Regardless of new paths in life, Soila’s love for her mother remains undiminished.
Born and raised in Kenya, Muchemi-Ndiritu, 46, obviously draws from her own experience of studying and working in New York city, making the book realistic and believable.
Lucky Girl seems written for an American market with several North American euphemisms such as collard greens to mean traditional green vegetables, or ‘triangles of pastry’ instead of samosas. The narrative for this debut book is highly linear which feels a bit restrictive, however, it is easy to read and moves along quickly.
The characters are well fleshed out and we get to know them, particularly Soila. The storyline is not vastly different from many other novels reviewing the immigrant experience in America, but it is a good introduction to this topic.
But perhaps there are too many issues highlighted in the book including female friendship, religion, sexual harassment and terrorism.
Nevertheless, interrogating the diverse angles of blackness, mother-daughter relationships, love and identity are some of the most thought-provoking aspects of Lucky Girl. It is also interesting to read how Alex, Leticia and other friends challenge Soila’s beliefs about race, particularly as a black woman who has led a sheltered existence.
Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu lives in Cape Town with her husband and children. Although this is her first novel, she was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize in 2019.
