Ayo > Recent Status Updates

“To recoil from his fellow citizens was a moral failure. By announcing “rude person. rude person” he only upset his own being.

If you were easy going, you’ll be fine in India. It was when you lost your temper or intolerant that the door shut in your face.”


🎯

“But if you feel it would be better to be admired by white people than to be admired by brown people, then you haven’t overcome the colonial narrative”

🫢❤️😬

“Our goals are often not even our own.

We borrow them from peers, celebrities and what we imagine society expects from us.”

🎯

“Don’t let anyone rob you of your imagination your creativity or your curiosity.

It’s your place in the world.

It’s your life.

Go on and do all you can with it. And make it the life you wanna live.”

😍❤️🥰

“History is being viewed on the television, through the eyes of a white American. The fact is, my parents were barely visible through the veil of that gaze. They were the props of empire. Characters with short time and no lines.”


Wow!!! I loved read this book 😍❤️🥰

“We chant, Stop the genocide!

But the election presses on. Blue or red, it’s genocide.”

Oh girl!!! You are shaking the table. Do we talk about these things in books now??? 🫢

“My mother says, In Vietnam, a life means so little. What does a life mean in America?

. . .Last year, the average American paid $5,109 to the U.S. military.”

💔😍❤️

She said:

“Once I dreamt I was swallowed by a snake. The snake was an immigrant household.”

OMG! OMG! Girl what??? *standing ovation*

😧😍❤️

“We didn’t have lines, we were “extras.” We’d survived a war to be cast into the margins of our own story. They say that cameras steal your souls. Sometimes, they do.

Sometimes, they pay minimum wage, which is more per hour than I earned an entire year working as an apprentice to a tailor.”

💔🥰❤️

“Daughter, I think you embellish what you don’t know. A bomb is nothing like a slammed door.

That is just your poetic imagination.

Have you seen a tree disappear into flames?

That’s what a bomb can do.”

💔😍❤️

“If I must tessellate this aloneness, it is this I most crave, to be done with aubades.

I want to stay here, with you, our backs against the water, starlings blotting out the sky.

I press my palms to my eyes and imagine a bloodless world. What moves through me is just wind and your breath.

I hold it as we march toward our own lives”


Oh wow!!! So beautiful 😍🥹❤️

“She had become one of those characters in the novels that she loved - the people who read Dickens in the jungle over and over.

Why?

Because when Dickens is better than your life, why live your life?”

😍😆🥰

“Sunny registered himself hypocritical too when he looked away from other Indians he saw on the street . . . trying to make it in America by avoiding one another as if it was better to be one Indians than two Indians.

Better to be two Indians than three Indians. And better an Indian in New York than an Indian in India. “

Oh wow! We are talking about this now in books???🔥😍❤️

“These women meanwhile realized they could snag a third world man far higher up the ladder of class and money than any fellow white American where their prospects were dim simply by using the bargaining power of their citizenship and their pale complexion.”

LMAO!!! This reminded me of Adiche’s style of prose. 🤣❤️🎯

“Even in this country where he’d assume love was different from the Indian version, it was not a private endeavor but all about being a public event.

If you didn’t stamp love with legitimacy and acknowledgment and stamp it some more silver and gold with further legalities and recognitions the ghost of future lost love infiltrated and your love became irrevocably unformed.”

🎯😍❤️

“The tectonic universe shifts and we are forced to move like birds fleeing the seasons.

I will not move.

Not today.”

😍❤️😍

“I never dreamt that one day you’d be my age and too bitter to talk to me.”

😍❤️😍

“Eventually loneliness and snow became the same thing in her mind, lighter than air”

😍❤️🥰

So this is a strangely executed book.

When the books starts - something happens, we don’t know why or how. The book goes back in time for almost 200 pages back to that moment and we still don’t know why and exactly how that thing happened.

Also the book bounces around different character perspective. Half way through and I can’t tell the main character.

Imma take a pause.Life is too short for this 🥰

“It’s not shame, it’s intelligence.”

Some things happen in this book within a blink of an eye that should have built up. And some things build up that should have been a blink in the story. 🫠

“Or perhaps it was confusion or ill founded conviction or a function oh her wretched written Japanese arrested at the level of a child. She never had a scientific mind in the first place. Her emotionalism often caused her to misrepresent superposition as fact.”

Ma’am please!! Are we reading a research paper??? 🤣

Though I like the story arc in this, I HATE the word choices so far. 🫠 no

“Pointing out that something is broken doesn’t hand us a solution.“

I’m not sure why a lot of folks hate this book.I liked so many things about. This gave a bit of ‘I who have never known men’,‘Dream Hotel’ & ‘Culpability’.

I liked the geographic and time period ambiguity.I liked the melodic writing style.I liked the nowness and IMO the themes are evident and mature.

I ate this up quickly🥰

“You spend so much of your life adhering to all of these rules and ideas. Keep everything orderly. Keep busy. Look presentable.

When we stopped following these basic tenets, I realized how meaningless they have been.”🥰

Whew!!! Lily (our main character) is desperate, ruthless and naive 🫠

“I looked at him. He was incredibly undeniably gorgeous.

I could see why I’d gravitated towards him in the beginning. I liked beautiful things. But there was a part of me that was ashamed by the shallowness I had shown in betting on him with so little thought.”

🥰❤️🥰

“I think the way we are living now preys on the idea of desire. It amplifies it to the point of absurdity.

You have to find someone to share a bed with or you’re out. You have to make someone want to share a bed with you or you’re out.”

😍❤️🎯

“If she had a personality I wouldn’t have to objectify her.”

This must have been such a fun book to write. I can image the thrill the author had fleshing out each of these many character personas. 😊

“I didn’t hate that I was the second most beautiful. I hated that I had to stand there and be told that everyone else thought so.”

😍❤️🥰

“Do you think any of the men would be black?

There’s usually one but not always. . . If it’s all white boys I’m screwed. The white boys never go for the black girl.”


GIRL!!! You went there??? I’m eating this book up quickly!!!

OBSESSED!!! 😍 🤣🥰

“While the sheer size of the compound was incredible, it was distinctively rundown. It looked a lot like the home of a billionaire if the billionaire’s staff had gone on strike.”

I LOVE so many things about this book already. This is so NOW!!!

Also I am fascinated by how Rawle describes. Her use of figurative language is neck turning !!!

😍❤️😍

“It is the habits we develop when we are not depressed that helps us slough off that depression”

This went from 0 to 100 inorganically. One minute she was self harming, by the end she’s all of a sudden loving her life. I have so many questions bearing the aftermath.

Regardless,it takes a lot of courage to be this vulnerable and Sehee will forever be an icon of contemporary literature.