A Particular Kind of Black Man

March 1, 2019

A Caine Prize winner and Rhodes Scholar recently named to the Africa39 list of promising young writers, Nigerian American Folarin explores the difficulties of assimilation through the life of Tunde Akinola', whose family has immigrated to Utah. Tunde's father works hard to get ahead, but his mother spins out of control and returns to Nigeria. From then on, Tunde realizes how he doesn't fit in and in the following years must journey to a new sense of self.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 3, 2019
Folarin’s tender, cunning debut begins as a realistic story of a boy coming of age in Utah in the 1980s, then slides into a subtle meditation on the unreliability of memory. Tunde, the older son of parents who emigrated from Nigeria, who is five years old when the novel opens, lives in a small town in Northern Utah where he is made to feel like an outsider. His hard-working father is frustrated because he can’t hold a job equal to his abilities, and his mentally ill mother frequently breaks down and physically abuses Tunde. When she leaves the family and returns home, Tunde’s father goes to Nigeria and brings back a “new mom,” who has two children of her own whom she prefers to her stepchildren. After a move to Texas, the narrator is accepted by Morehouse College, where he realizes to his alarm that he is experiencing “double memories” and is seeing “things I could have done as if I had done them,” which causes him to re-write the version of the past by which the reader has come to know him. Only when he visits Nigeria does “reality click into place.” Folarin pulls off the crafty trick of simultaneously bringing scenes to sharp life and undercutting their reliability, and evokes the complexities of life as a second-generation African-American in simple, vivid prose. Foralin’s debut is canny and electrifying.
Agent: Maria Massie, Massie & McQuilkin.

Starred review from July 1, 2019
Being Black in America is difficult enough. But Tunde Akinola is crushed by the weight of his additional burdens: being the son of a Nigerian immigrant, his father's own challenges of navigating America with black skin, and worst of all, his mother's schizophrenia. Growing up in white Utah, Tunde and his younger brother, Tayo, are disoriented enough by their Blackness, but when mental illness makes their mother a stranger, Tunde is completely at sea. That confused time creates a lasting traumatic impression on Tunde, who holds on to his fractured family as Dad tries to make a living from a peripatetic life of trying and shedding new careers like second skins. Nigerian American Rhodes Scholar and Caine Prize-winning first novelist Folarin delivers a remarkably mature narrator, who must make peace with his past and navigate racial realities in the U.S. He wrestles with the shadows cast by both home-brewed racism and vestiges of colonialism imported from Nigeria. As Tunde achingly admits, This was my main problem. I had no idea how to be black. I mean, I was black, I am black, I can't change that, but I had no idea how to be a black American. An African American. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)