You Are the Place You’re Looking For: Finding Home in Zainab Takes New York

There’s something disarmingly earnest about Zainab Sekyi. She’s not jaded. She doesn’t posture. She believes, perhaps foolishly, that a city can fix her, that by moving to New York, she might finally outrun heartbreak, confusion, the ghosts of her Ghanaian childhood and the rules that tethered her to “shoulds.” In Ayesha Harruna Attah’s Zainab Takes New York, we meet a twenty-something Ghanaian woman who is in the process of reassembling herself career-wise, emotionally, and spiritually; in one of the most performative cities on the planet. And yet, this is not a novel about the grind. It’s about soul-work. Attah offers a coming-of-age story not about arrival, but return to self, to softness, to clarity.

What distinguishes Zainab Takes New York from the usual young-woman-in-the-city fare is its quiet refusal to chase spectacle. The emotional beats here are familiar: job dissatisfaction, friend drama, failed romance, but they’re not treated as punchlines or plot devices. Instead, they’re spiritual prompts. Zainab is less obsessed with what’s happening to her than with why it keeps happening. She journals. She reflects. She tries yoga, astrology, herbalism, tarot. And while some of that might scream “TikTok wellness era,” the book handles it with care. This is not satire. Zainab is not being mocked for seeking. And for once, neither is the reader.

Attah’s prose is light without being shallow. The chapters move quickly, almost episodically, a structure that mirrors Zainab’s restlessness. She interns at a fashion magazine but feels adrift. She loves her best friend, Tara, but is wary of the cultural rift that often complicates their bond. Tara is Indian-American, secular, and Manhattan-polished, while Zainab is still working out how much of her Ghanaian Muslim upbringing she wants to carry into her new life. She flirts, dates, kisses men she doesn’t quite like, and avoids the ones who might actually see her. She keeps busy, because stillness terrifies her.

This is, at heart, a novel about a crisis of self. Zainab’s New York isn’t just a backdrop, it’s a mirror. The city reflects everything she isn’t sure about: what it means to be Ghanaian in a Western metropolis; how to claim a spiritual identity that’s fluid but not vague; whether love, the lasting kind, is a discovery or a discipline. And at the core of it all is the deeper, quieter question: who am I when no one is watching?

Millennial and Gen Z readers will recognize this mood instantly. The quarter-life unraveling. The search for therapy when therapy’s not enough. The balancing act of ancestral expectation and personal freedom. What makes Zainab so compelling as a character is that she’s not in crisis because of some singular, dramatic event. She’s in crisis because she’s finally sitting with herself. And sometimes that’s the hardest work of all.

Attah weaves in spiritual traditions that don’t often get center stage in fiction like this. When Zainab begins seeing a spiritual guide; part therapist, part diviner, part mystic, there’s no irony or mockery. We’re not asked to believe in everything Zainab does, only to take her journey seriously. The guide becomes a conduit for reflection, gently nudging her toward ancestral practices and self-trust. These scenes are some of the novel’s most tender. They suggest that healing, for many in the African diaspora, cannot be fully divorced from the spiritual, even if it’s a spirituality patched together from fragments.

There are moments when Zainab Takes New York flirts with cliché; the friend breakup, the dreamy artist love interest, the epiphany at a spiritual retreat but Attah always pulls back before it gets too glossy. She knows that real change is rarely cinematic. There’s no dramatic confrontation or public reckoning. Instead, there’s silence. Breathing. Space. One of the novel’s gifts is how it dignifies the invisible work of self-healing.

The supporting characters serve as both contrasts and companions. Tara is the confident friend who has mastered surface-level self-awareness, but fumbles with depth. Carlos, Zainab’s new-age spiritual guide turned love interest, is charming but slightly too perfect, a reminder that even in healing spaces, fantasy can get in the way of real connection. There’s also Kwame, the ex she ran from, whose reappearance forces her to confront what she’s been avoiding all along: forgiveness.

Attah writes New York as a city of many masks. There’s the work self, the party self, the lover self, the immigrant self. Zainab cycles through all of them, each time shedding a layer of illusion. If you’ve ever moved to a new city hoping to find yourself, only to realize you brought all your confusion with you, this book will feel like a friend. Attah gets it. Reinvention isn’t transformation. It’s repetition with a twist.

One of the novel’s subtler achievements is its attention to race and belonging without overexplaining. Zainab is Black, African, Muslim, a woman and the way these identities shape her movement through New York is neither incidental nor overdetermined. We see microaggressions at work, fetishizations in dating, and cultural misunderstanding between friends. But Attah doesn’t frame Zainab’s life as a social issue. These are just her realities, handled with nuance, never pedantry.

This is also a novel about being African in America in the 21st century, in a way that feels refreshingly specific. Zainab’s Ghanaian-ness is not exoticized, but neither is it reduced to a checklist of jollof rice and proverbs. It’s in her rhythms of speech, her internal moral compass, the way she hesitates to overshare even when everyone around her is emotionally naked. She is both inside and outside the American cultural script and that in-betweenness gives the novel its texture.

For younger readers especially, Zainab Takes New York offers something rare: a narrative of Black womanhood that centers softness. Zainab is not a “strong Black woman” trope. She’s not fierce or sassy or trauma-scarred. She’s just…searching. Vulnerable. Uncertain. And in a literary landscape that often demands spectacle from its Black female characters, Zainab’s quietness feels radical. She’s allowed to drift. To daydream. To change her mind.

There’s a quiet confidence to the novel’s structure. Attah doesn’t rush resolution. Zainab’s arc is emotional, not event-driven. And while the ending offers a sense of clarity, it avoids the trap of over-tidiness. Zainab doesn’t “arrive” in any grand sense, she just takes one deliberate step in a new direction. And sometimes, that’s enough.

Zainab Takes New York is not about New York at all. It’s about the inner life of a woman brave enough to admit she’s lost, and gentle enough to find her way home without spectacle. For a generation exhausted by performance, by curated lives and branded selves, this novel is a soft, steady reminder that you don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to show up to your own life, your own history, your own body. As Zainab herself learns: you are the place you’ve been looking for.