Lucky Girl is a great debut by Kenyan author Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu. Soila comes to America for college and not only deals with a difficult and overbearing mothers, but also the challenges of race, roots, and immigration. It is a heavy read at times, but I found myself rooting for Soila as she tried to make and find her way.

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley for this ARC.

This is a beautiful novel about love and loyalty told through the eyes of Soila, a Kenyan-American immigrant.

Soila has always felt smothered by her overbearing mother. Her father died when she was young and Soila grew up in the privileged class in Kenya by her single mother with the help of her loveable aunts and grandmother. When Soila has the opportunity to move to the US to study, she jumps on it, much to the dismay of her mother. In the US, Soila experiences freedoms for the first time as she makes new friends and discovers a world so different from her upbringing. But her mother is still a strong force in her life as Soila tries to find the right balance of her desires and her mother’s expectations.

This novel is a lovely journey of self discovery. Through Soila, the reader gains insight into her evolving ideas on being a black American vs a black African. I could relate to her struggles to figure out where she fit as a Kenyan but also as an American. We feel her need to please her mom yet fulfill her own desires in her career, in love and in life.

Thank you to @thedialpress @netgalley for this early review copy.

Solia was raised by her stern and conservative mother, grandmother, and aunts after her father died in 1980s Kenya. Chafing against her mother’s restrictions, Solia finally was able to wear her down to attend college in New York City. After an assault by a family friend, Solia vowed never to return to Kenya. America, to her, was the land of opportunity, and she was determined to make it. But, after making friends with an African American girl on campus, Solia slowly realizes that America isn’t as wonderful as she thought. The legacy of slavery and racism in America is apparent every time she goes to a store or hears stories from her friends about how they were treated by the police or other citizens of the country. Her Kenyan upbringing made her blind to slavery and how brown/black people in America are treated. Then she falls in love with an artist, and Solia needs to make choices. Does she honor the wishes of her mother? Does she embrace her Kenyan background? Or does she continue to live in America and make her way? Is there a way to do all three?

Like most books I see floating around the blogosphere, Lucky Girl caught my attention when I saw a couple of reviews. I liked what I read and immediately added it as want to read on Goodreads (gotta love Goodreads shelves). I didn’t think I would read this book until Random House had it up as a wish on NetGalley. I hit that button and promptly forgot about it (because that’s how I am). So, imagine my surprise when I got the email that the publisher granted my wish. I am glad I got my wish granted because this book was great to read. It lived up to the reviews I read.

There are triggers in Lucky Girl. They are:

Racism: Racism is a big part of this book. Solia never experienced racism while living in Kenya. She lived in an insulated bubble. She came across as a little ignorant during discussions about race with her friends. I liked how her friends gently (and in one very memorable scene, not so gently) explained racism in America.
Suicide: Solia’s father committed suicide before the book started. Solia was kept in the dark by it until she was ten years old when her mother told her about that day. It was very graphic for a ten-year-old. It was graphic for me to read, and I am almost 46!!
Spousal Abuse: Solia’s grandmother was beaten by her grandfather daily. The abuse happened off-page and was nongraphic when Solia recounted it.
Child Abuse: Solia was verbally, emotionally, and mentally abused by her mother throughout the book.
Miscarriages: Solia’s grandmother miscarried several times due to being beaten. Nothing was graphic; it was stated as a fact.
Maiming after a bombing: Solia’s favorite aunt (Tanei) was horrifically burned in maimed in the Nairobi embassy bombing in 1998.
Sexual Assault: Solia is sexually assaulted by a priest. The priest, a close family friend, tells Solia he could sway her mother to let Solia attend college in America if she did one thing. He then assaulted her with his fingers.
Abortion: Solia gets an abortion in the late 1990s/early 2000s. The author doesn’t go into the procedure itself, but she does explore the feelings Solia experienced before, during, and after.
Grief: Solia experiences grief several times during the book.
PTSD: Solia experiences PTSD after being in one of the Twin Towers during 9-11.
Early-on set Alzehimers: Solia’s mother develops early onset Alzehimers disease towards the end of the book. It is graphic with how confused she was and how Solia struggled with the decision to take care of her.
If any of these trigger you, I recommend not reading the book.

Lucky Girl was a wonderfully written book that took critical issues in America and showed them through another set of eyes. Solia was a naive Kenyan who lived in an insulated bubble at home. When she arrived in America, she realized how insulated she was. Reading about Solia’s journey as she discovered herself was terrific. Her journey wasn’t easy and, at times, was full of pain and self-doubt. But Solia learned essential life lessons from each challenge she overcame.

There is so much about this book that I could focus on, but I will talk about two points that stood out to me the most. Solia’s naivety to racism and her job on Wall Street. I knew she would be in for a rude awakening when she arrived in America. But I wasn’t expecting her to almost look down on African Americans or think less about their plight in this country. It was hard to read her explanations for why she felt the way she did, but it was even harder to read Letitca’s comebacks. Racism was (and still is) a huge problem in this country. I am glad that the author chose to address it in Lucky Girl.

As for her job on Wall Street, I didn’t understand it. Maybe it’s just me, but why would you want to stay in a position that made you work to the point you felt numb? And why would you stay in a job that you hated? In Solia’s case, it was because her mother expected her to. I felt awful for Solia during that part of her life. She wasn’t living; she was existing, and just existing doesn’t make you happy.

There is so much more that I could write in this review, but I would end up giving away some spoilers. So, I am going to end the review here. I will say that I wasn’t surprised with how the book ended. I was surprised by where Solia ended up and who she was with.

I would recommend Lucky Girl to anyone over 21. There are language, violence, and sexual situations. Also, see my trigger warnings.

Many thanks to Random House Publishing Group -Random House, Dial Press Trade Paperback, NetGalley, and Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu for allowing me to read and review Lucky Girl. All opinions stated in this review are mine.

This book is broken up into different parts. It begins with Soila in Africa being raised by her very conservative mother, her grandmother and her Aunts. When she gets older she decides to go to school in America much to her mothers dismay. Ultimately she lets Soila go. There Soila is confronted with wealthy white Americans, racism and poverty. She has a hard time understanding how the legacy of systemic racism and history of slavery affect black Americans. While in America her relationship with her mother is a struggle between what she feels she should do and what she wants for herself. When she meets and falls in love with an artist her mother is furious and Soila rebels.

There is so much going on in this book. Cultural differences, racism, poverty, mother/daughter relationships, parental expectations, religion and coming of age and finding yourself. I loved this book. The conversations Soila has with her white and her black friends are fantastic and really help to appreciate the difference in the way people of different races and cultures see things. This is a fantastic debut and what I would consider a must read.

"Lucky Girl" by Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu is a powerful and inspiring memoir that tells the story of the author's journey from a difficult childhood in rural Kenya to becoming a successful entrepreneur in the United States. The book is written in a clear and engaging style, with the author's voice coming through strongly and authentically.

What sets this memoir apart is the way it balances the struggles and hardships of the author's early life with her resilience, perseverance, and ultimately, her success. The author's journey is a testament to the power of determination and hard work, and her story is sure to inspire readers who may be facing their own challenges.

However, while the memoir is compelling and well-written, it does occasionally feel like certain aspects of the author's journey are glossed over or omitted. Additionally, some readers may find the writing style to be overly simplistic at times.

Overall, "Lucky Girl" is a moving and inspiring memoir that is well worth reading. While it may not be perfect, it is a powerful reminder of the importance of perseverance and the potential for success in the face of adversity. I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a story of resilience and triumph.

Lucky Girl is a brilliant debut novel by Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu. There is so much to learn and to absorb from this story. The book is about family, love, fulfilling ourselves while we remain attached to our heritage. Soila wants to expand her life and move on from a very controlling mother. She chooses to go to college in New York, breaking away from Africa and her mother while still honoring her mother’s career choice. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and sincerely hope that Muchemi-Ndiritu will continue writing. I recommend Lucky Girl to all readers who enjoy reading of diversity and differing cultures.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sharing this book with me.

Coming of age, emotional, jarring, bright— Lucky Girl is going to be one of those stories you read over and over again just to be in the moment again. I absolutely loved it. I rooted for Solia the entire time and grieved with her at every turn of the way.

The writing was perfection and I felt like I was transported into the story. Very well done!!

I really enjoyed this book. I love reading books to learn more about the world and others' perspectives. This one was a fresh new perspective-the voice of an African young woman who moves to the United States. While being Black, too, she has different life experiences than Black Americans, and I loved hearing from this viewpoint. Soila was raised in an affluent home in Kenya, though one where her mother never showed her much affection. She moves to NYC for college, and becomes friends with several different people. It was eye opening to read about how some cultures view Americans. I kept reading to know what happens to Soila as she grows up, takes a job in finance, has several relationships, and deals with her mother, who was not an easy woman to love or please. For fans of coming of age novels and fans who want to read about others perspectives, this is sure to be a hit.

I really enjoyed this book and I was cheering for Soila through the whole book.

Soila is a girl from Kenya who comes to America to go to college. Her family is fairly well off in Kenya and the "big job" is everything to her mother. The trouble with that is that Soila falls in love with New York City. She falls in love with New York City and wants to photograph it professionally.

I loved watching Soila's character grow and change. There are some topical issues that were interesting to read about.

Great book. I highly recommend it!

Lucky Girl by Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu is a story of one young, sheltered woman who longs for independence must learn about the challenges of race, love and family. To all, Solia is one lucky girl. Raised by her stern, conservative mother and a host of aunts, she lived a protected life in Nairobi, Kenya. Solia is also headstrong, outspoken and rails against the strict rules she must live by. She takes the chance to leave it all beyond by attending Barnard College in New York City. But New York City in the 1990s is not what she expected. Instead of the golden land of opportunity, she finds entitlement, racism and forces her to acknowledge that her Kenyan upbringing has created a different understanding of racism and slavery. When Solia falls in love with a free-spirited artist who her mother would never approve of, she is caught between choosing her Kenyan identity and her family obligations and her own heart.
Lucky Girl is a fierce and yet tender story about the lives and loves we choose, what it means to be an African immigrant in America and how a young woman finds herself in the world. Reading the beautifully moving words, it was hard to believe that Lucky Girl is the debut novel of Ms. Muchemi-Ndiritu. It is a thought provoking story about life, love and our interactions with each other. Lucky Girl shows that we can learn from each other as our different perspectives can add a new piece to the overall picture of life. I devoured this book as I could not put it down. Solia’s story drew me in and I learned with her and experienced from her eyewitness experiences of life in New York City. I enjoyed watching Solia grow from a sheltered young woman to a woman with a deeper understanding of the complexities of the world around us. I highly recommend Lucky Girl.


Lucky Girl is available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook

4 bright stars for an enjoyable book of literary fiction. This is the story of a young woman from Kenya, Africa, who comes to the US to attend university on a 5 year visa. Her mother has built up a business in Kenya to the extent that she can pay $40,000 tuition a year for 4 years. Soila has had conflicts with her mother while still living in Kenya, but living in the US, falling in love and experiencing a foreign culture, bring new areas of conflict with her domineering mother.
Some hot button issues touched on in this heartwarming and frank book:
Racism and driving while black
Religion and its role in family and society, both in the US and Kenya
Abortion
Hidden family secrets
Sexual abuse
Suicide
Choices that threaten to tear Soila apart
Since the author was born in Nairobi, Kenya and attended college in the US, some of this book may be based on her experiences.
Two quotes: Soila and her mother having a conversation:
Mother: "You should eat lemons---I tell you all the time," she said, dividing it into small sections. "They ward off diseases."
"She held each section between her lips and sucked out the juice, then crushed it in her mouth. I winced."
Advice from Soila's grandmother: "Kokoi always said that most people spent their whole lives smiling with their mouths. 'Only a few of us are blessed to find the kind of happiness that makes a person smile with their eyes."
Thank You Corina Diez at Random House/Dial Press for sending me this eARC, through NetGalley, due to be published on
May 2, 2023
#LuckyGirl #NetGalley

Lucky Girl is the story of Kenyan born Soila, who leaves Kenya to go to school in America. Partly to escape her overbearing mother and also to escape the man who took advantage of her when she needed a friend.
In New York Soila finds friends, love and loss and is faced with the decision of choosing between her family and Kenyan roots, over her new life.

This was a great book. Deep, at times disturbing and sad, but always gripping and well written.
I loved Soila’s Aunts, all so different, with great personalities and side stories. I would have loved to see more of them.
Soila at times irritated me, but her character was so perfectly flawed that it added to the story for me.

Read this if you’re looking for a deep, slow burn to pop you out of a slump.

Lucky Girl by Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu was a story that had me smiling at times but there were also scenes that brought me to tears. It is a coming of age story that also looks at family obligations and adjusting to a new culture. Soila was raised by her mother in a home with her grandmother and her four aunts. She was only five when her father died. Her mother embraced religion after his death and kept a tight rein on her daughter as she grew. She has a vision of the woman that Soila should be and has mapped out her future. Soila, however, enlists the help of her aunts to apply to American universities rather than the local college in Nairobi. Soila’s passion is photography, but she agrees to her mother’s demand that she major in business and sets off for New York.

Soila falls in love with the city and finds a kindred spirit in Letitia, a fellow student who becomes more like a sister. She finds love with an artist who encourages her photography and settles into a position as an analyst with a financial firm. When she loses a friend and mentor on 9/11 she begins to re-evaluate her priorities. Her overbearing mother, however, refuses to accept her decisions. One of the difficulties that Soila encounters is the difference in cultures. It is hard to see the difficulties faced by minorities in America when she grew up with a wealthy family in Kenya. It leads to several disagreements with her friends, but also serves as a learning experience for her. A family crisis brings big changes to her life, but it also brings her family together. Secrets are revealed, compromises are made and you are finally left with a true feeling of what being a part of a family really means. I would like to thank NetGalley and Random House Publishers for providing this book for my review.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for the arc of Lucky Girl.

This novel follows the life of a young girl from Kenya who wants to study in the United States to distance herself from her mother and find out what else there is to life other than following the rules and attending church. The novel spans about 10 years as we watch the main character go from graduating college to getting her first job to finding love, and finally dealing with her mom's illness.

Overall I was very disappointed with this book. It felt like the author used every new chapter to introduce a new life altering event to the characters life. By the end of the book I thought to myself, "what else could possibly happen next?" Then something would big would happen. I don't think normal people deal with that many enormous life events in a span of 10 years. I thought the book was boring and found it hard to find sympathy for the main character.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Random House for this read. This was a strong coming of age about a girl living under and for her parents expectations. Wow...is really all I need to say about this book. It was so real in some points that I was wondering if it was a true story. This was well written and what the author writes next I will want to read.

4.25 stars

“To love is nothing, to be loved is quite something. But to love and be loved is everything.”

Lucky Girl is a brilliant debut novel by author Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu that explores the idea of independence and love in all its forms through the lens of protagonist, Soila.

Though Soila has always been the model Kenyan child for her mother, she finally decides to exert a bit of independence by coming to the United States for college. While there, she finds her privileged worldview challenged time and time again. As Soila finds herself, she also realizes that she does not want to fit into the narrow box her mother has created for her, even if it comes at a high cost. Can Soila truly find her independence, free from deeply ingrained societal expectations and cultural norms, or will she end up back where she started, having sacrificed her life and love to fulfill her familial role?

This book is, in many ways, a coming-of-age story. Soila is constantly figuring out how to move in the world, and her beliefs and viewpoints evolve and develop over time. Though there are very specific cultural references and norms that are explicated, there are also universal themes about what it means to be a part of a family, and what lengths you will go to in order to be true to yourself. I think the way that the narrative unfolds is both heart wrenching and heartwarming, and I appreciated the window into a life that is completely foreign to my own, but that still resonated with me in vital ways.

The ending is the true triumph, because it really seeks to answer the questions that the book has been posing all along. And it will leave you feeling hopeful about the life and the love that Soila chooses for herself.

Thank you to The Dial Press and NetGalley for generously providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Lucky Girl was a thoughtful and poignant story. Although the world of the novel, which begins in Kenya in the 1980s, was unfamiliar to me, I quickly felt immersed in the narrator, Soila's, emotional life. The story held my attention through her childhood and adolescence and into the meat of the novel, the collision of her values and outlook with her college and adult life in New York, and especially the experiences of her Black American friends.

Unfortunately, the story faltered somewhat in this middle section, with long dialogues on what it means to be Black in America and the differing experiences of Africans, African Americans, and others. This is certainly an important topic, but I would have appreciated a more direct tie-in with Soila's - the first person narrator's - experiences and related emotions; in their absence, the discussion was interesting but not affecting.

In its final chapters, as the plot built toward its climax, the book's questions of race and culture are inverted, and I found this section to be the most interesting and moving part of the book. For all her years in New York, Soila still struggles to reconcile her mother's traditional expectations with her own desires. As she meets with a series of events that challenge the fragile peace between her worlds, Soila must examine whether her new friends can truly support her, and whether they, as Black Americans, can understand what it means to be African.

Muchemi-Ndiritu's debut novel was a mixed bag for me. On the positive side, the depictions of Kenyan society, especially the peek into Masai culture, grabbed my attention. This novel was a refreshing look at a young woman's coming of age and her attempt to bridge cultures and generations. I loved some of the descriptions, such as the descent into the Rift Valley (I lived for a short while in Kenya in a Masia town near this spot, and the author's depiction took me right there). I always want to explore the unfamiliar, so kudos for bringing this story to Western readers.

However, several elements of the book didn't work for me. As historical fiction, I often felt the voice and references were too muddied with modern concepts. There were moments when the lead character, for example, was using a cell phone at a time when few people had access to these new devices. What detracted most from the story was how the author set up discussions between characters. They would often meet for a meal or some other activity, and then one character would lecture the other about some societal topic. As a reader, it felt more like being lectured to than being emersed in a story. Also, some storylines were left hanging, especially the side story about the half-sister.

Thanks to NetGalley for giving me access to an electronic ARC in exchange for a review.

This is an excellent coming-of-age story and debut novel. Some of the beliefs the characters state (i.e., Soila's discussions of her upbringing in Kenya and African cultures vs. other characters' experiences growing up as Black folks living in America) feel prescriptive--lots of telling rather than showing--but overall its an effective technique to outline issues that should be considered more (especially by white folks). The scenes with Soila's mom are infuriating and tragic, but again, these difficult circumstances are necessary to showcase. The ending is surprisingly heartwarming (in the best possible way).

Thoughtful and thought provoking. Soila lived in privilege in Kenya but she was also abused in so many ways. When she flees to New York, a whole different world opens up but then she begins to understand what the color of her skin means. This takes in the 1990s and early 2000s. Soila is a sympathetic protagonist you'll root for. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. A good read.