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.

A beautifully written coming of age story in which Soila, a young Kenyan woman, travels to the US for college, finds love, loses love, and ultimately discovers who she really wants to be.

This book makes a lot of interesting comparisons between life in the US vs. Kenya and (thankfully) lets the reader come to their own conclusions about Soila's decisions.

Lucky Girl was an incredibly written, multilayered novel about growing up under our parents expectations. I loved this book way more than I thought I would. It was very real and the characters were all well written. Some of the real life events in the book were heartbreaking. I really, really enjoyed this book and I will definitely look forward to this author’s next book!

An incredible coming-of-age story about a Kenyan woman, Soila who travels to the USA for school. While in school she is confronted by the vast differences when it comes to poverty, racism, culture, and how her own beliefs have the potential to be prejudiced.
I liked how being in America did open Soila’s eyes to these differences and helped her to connect with her half sister.
This was a very eyeopening read when it comes to such topics, while also taking on other important topics such as: predators, religion, abortion and Alzheimers.

This is a poignant and lovely story. It tells the story of Soila and spans several years. The story tells of family secrets and the love that binds them. It is also a love story between a man and a woman. This talented author does a magnificent job weaving this tale. It is at times sad and hits on major catastrophic events. This is countered with moments of joy leading to the beautiful end.

Lucky Girl is a book described as "A fresh look at racism, privilege, and the challenges of coming-of-age and falling in love between two cultures." Lucky Girl is about this and so much more. Soila was raised by her mother in Kenya. Her father died when she was five years old. Soila's mother is a very dominating mother, like many mothers in Kenya. Her mother has told Soila her entire life what she expects from her. However, what Soila wants and what her mother wants are two different things entirely. To make things even worse, the things that Soila wants are things her mother disapproves of.

Soila moves to the United States to attend college. Here she is exposed to the vast differences between her culture and Black American culture. Soila also realizes that many things that she now knows will make her happy, her mother would never approve of. As Soila tries to balance her new life with her old, she is forced to make some very difficult decisions.

I loved this book. It is about so many things. Although it maybe starts a little slow, it soon picks up and will keep you wanting to read to see what is going to happen next. I don't do this very often, but there was a quote in the book that I wrote down. Soila's mother had always told her "Every person, even the village idiot, knows something you don't--even the people you think are stupid know something you can learn from." How much better we all would be if we would remember this!

I received an ARC of Lucky Girl in exchange for an honest review.

So much packed into this debut novel. Told through the perspective of Soila, a Kenyan girl who grows up sheltered, privileged, & longing for freedom. After moving to NYC in the 90s, all her beliefs are challenged, and she’s forced to choose between her Kenyan identity or create her own path. Some parts were emotionally hard to read, but I’m so glad I read this book. **Trigger warning: one quick scene of assault

Thank you NetGalley for an advanced copy!

Thanks to Net Galley and Dial Press, and Random House Publishing for the ARC! Really enjoyed Soila’s story. Soils grows up in Kenya and leaves for college in NYC. In NY, she struggles to find her place, to understand race relations, to fit in, to find balance between what she wants from life and how to honor her Kenyan culture and family. I learned a lot and really enjoyed the book.

If you loved maame you should read this book. A look at a sheltered woman’s coming of age. Her mother is very strict and after a harrowing sexual assault the main character heads off to new york where she finds love and herself. Great writing and it touches on a lot of important topics.