This was a kind of a placeholder for me. I’m not allowing myself to reread American Gods again, because I reread it less than a year ago, and I love it too much, and the TV series is coming, and it’s my favorite kind of book, so I had to find a proxy, and this looked super interesting. And it was good, but not amazing (nothing is American Gods, goddamnit!). I think the hardest for me was that Ike is no hero, antihero, complicated scamp, […]
All others pay retail
Ikechukwu Uzondu is a Nigerian immigrant struggling to make ends meet in New York City. He graduated cum laude from Amherst in economics, but xenophobic/provincial attitudes about his accent have kept him from finding a high-powered money job in Manhattan. Instead, he’s driving a cab and ducking increasingly desperate emails from his sister about their mother’s financial straits. But Ike–pronounced EE-kay, not “eye-k”–has a plan. He’s heard of a gallery in New York that sells diety paraphernalia. He’ll run home to Nigeria, grab the local […]
Foreign Gods, Inc.
This is the seventh of ten African books. I’ve been trying to get these books from different African countries, but Nigerian authors are so prolific! They’re hard to escape. Maybe after I finish the ten, I’ll seek out more non-Nigerian books to even it out. Foreign Gods, Inc. is about Ike, a cabdriver in NYC who had a promising future…until he married poorly and started gambling. Embarrassed by his failures (and his ex-wife), he ignores his mother’s e-mailed pleas for help–he can’t send money home, […]