Three Black women are linked in unexpected ways to the same influential white man in Stockholm as they build their new lives in the most open society run by the most private people.
Successful marketing executive Kemi Adeyemi is lured from the U.S. to Sweden by Jonny von Lundin, CEO of the nation's largest marketing firm, to help fix a PR fiasco involving a racially tone-deaf campaign.
A killer at work but a failure in love, Kemi's move is a last-ditch effort to reclaim her social life.
A chance meeting with Jonny in business class en route to the U.S. propels former model-turned-flight-attendant Brittany-Rae Johnson into a life of wealth, luxury, and privilege—a life she's not sure she wants—as the object of his unhealthy obsession.
And refugee Muna Saheed, who lost her entire family, finds a job cleaning the toilets at Jonny's office as she works to establish her residency in Sweden and, more importantly, seeks connection and a place she can call home.
Told through the perspectives of each of the three women, In Every Mirror She's Black is a fast-paced, richly nuanced yet accessible contemporary novel that touches on important social issues of racism, classism, fetishization, and tokenism, and what it means to be a Black woman navigating a white-dominated society.
My Review of In Every Mirror She's Black by Lola Akinmade Akerstrom.
This book tells the tale of being black in a place far away from home, in the lives of three characters.
Kemi, Muna and Brittany-Rae are three black women who are somehow summoned by Jonny Von Lundin, a successful heir to a business empire in Sweden.
Kemi, as a professional marketing executive, who leaves her work in Andersen and Associates in America at the spur of the moment, to go for a more elevated position with mouth-watering benefits in the business empire of the Von Lundins in Sweden.
She's excellent in her work, ambitious and brilliant, but with a love life hanging on a weak thread. Which goes to say, you can never really have it all.
And Brittany-Rae, a beautiful, black model, who works as a flight assistant, and whose meeting with Jonny Von Lundin in London, births the beginning of an amorous relationship between them.
We also see the life of Muna, a young Somali refugee, whose entire life is a tragic film on its own.
These three black women meet in the Von Lundins empire, Kemi as a worker, Brittany as a spouse and Muna as a cleaner.
In the lives of these women, the author portrays what it means to be black, and not what the cliché narrative of being black have been desperately shoving down our throats.
To be black is to be human. To make mistakes, to be in love and lust. To be a star, to be ambitious, to crave a life of comfort.
To be black doesn't mean automatically being friends with every black person in the block, it means being who you are, a human, whether friendly or not.
It teaches us the beauty of heterogeneity, in a world that's constantly forcing homogeneity on everyone. It is okay to be different, to be eccentric.
What's not okay is making people believe they're not different, they're like everyone else. When in reality, they are not. They have special needs, they need to embrace them, accept them.
In every mirror she's black is a very interesting read, one that would make you see the world in every character.
We learn about the American world, and the Swedish world, with a subtle touch of Somali, Nigeria and other African countries here and there.
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