(4.5 stars) I can see why this author listed George Eliot's Middlemarch among her favorites in My Ideal Bookshelf - much like that classic, 'Americanah' feels simultaneously sprawling and contained, a window into the inner lives of many. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes beautiful prose, and the characters in this book feel far more psychologically complex than those in her earlier book, Purple Hibiscus. 
 The commentaries on being an African black person in America were fascinating, but eventually began to feel a little repetitive. The plot, built on a bunch of anecdotes told in retrospect, was a bit aimless for my taste. Regardless, this was an intelligently crafted and multilayered novel I'd recommend to anyone looking for an outsider's perspective on America's strange race relations.