ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF

Scarred by a childhood and adolescence spent as the face of her stepmother’s social media empire, a London woman tries to protect her little sister from the same fate.

Aṅụrị Chinasa is not okay. While she runs two thriving businesses and, at 25, has enough money to afford a two-bedroom apartment in London, she struggles with alcoholism, likes to verbally abuse consenting men online, and is semi-estranged from her father, Nkem, and her stepmother, Ophelia. Enabled by Nkem, Ophelia, a famous blogger, made a name for herself on the back of her experiences raising Aṅụrị, sharing photos, videos, and anecdotes that won her millions of fans and lucrative sponsorships. For Aṅụrị, the material benefits of such fame and fortune couldn’t outweigh the social and emotional drawbacks—constant scrutiny, a lack of anonymity, even a kidnapping attempt—but Nkem and Ophelia didn’t see it that way. When Aṅụrị cut ties with the business at age 18, she was soon replaced by Nkem and Ophelia’s new baby, Noelle. Five years after Noelle’s birth, Aṅụrị, still suffering the ill effects of hypervisibility, sues Ophelia in an attempt to force her stepmother to expunge her social media accounts and commercial ventures of anything Aṅụrị-related. Roughly around the same time, the relentlessly momagered Noelle begins to exhibit worrisome behavior. Concerned for her sister’s welfare, Aṅụrị undertakes a new crusade against the backdrop of the ongoing lawsuit: to liberate Noelle from stardom. For all the righteousness of Aṅụrị’s cause, Nwabineli’s cleareyed narrator resists the temptation to wholly vilify Nkem and Ophelia; brief chapters told from their perspectives, coupled with the narrator’s occasional injections of background information, offer insight into why they made the mistakes they did. In many ways, this novel recalls Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). Both novels foreground immigrants and immigrant struggles, including racism and xenophobia (Nkem and an infant Aṅụrị emigrated to England from Nigeria after Aṅụrị’s mother died; Ophelia’s contrasting whiteness is a subtle point of tension); both novels have the same sweeping third-person-omniscient point of view, peppered with wry observations about life and humanity. Though it isn’t a modern classic like White Teeth, this novel tells a moving, thought-provoking story that interrogates the toxic and parasocial dynamics associated with influencing.

A parable for the social media age that critiques without resorting to alarmism or preachiness.