Award-winning author Lolá Ákínmádé Åkerström’s highly anticipated sophomore novel, Everything Is Not Enough, is a unique gem of nuanced contemporary fiction that follows the lives of three Black women striving to settle in Stockholm. Despite their considerable talents and energy, they are relegated to the margins, their dreams threatened by a white-dominated society set up to prefer homogeneity.

The book takes up where the author’s debut novel, In Every Mirror She’s Black, left off, with the same alternation among three close-third-person POVs and with two of the same principal characters. Former flight attendant and fashion model Brittany-Rae von Lundin married Jonny von Lundin, CEO of Sweden’s largest marketing firm, two years ago because “she wanted to taste what it felt like to be wrapped in a class above all others, where race no longer mattered. She…welcomed his advances. She wanted his privilege cloaked around her shoulders.”

Now she suffocates. Jonny dotes on their young daughter, and Brittany’s life of faux furs and elegance sparks envy in all, but she feels objectified, not just for being the token Black wife but because she’s the image of Jonny’s former (and now deceased) girlfriend, with whom he’s obsessed. Is she brave enough to end her marriage — and her addiction to her husband’s violent lovemaking — and become the fashion designer she yearns to be?

Kemi Adeyemi is a senior marketing executive at Jonny’s firm, recruited to help the company overcome the racist and sexist proclivities she herself experiences there. Her boyfriend, Tobias Wikström, may lack ambition, but his Gambian mother says he’s waited all his life for “a strong African woman” like Kemi. Yet he refuses to move to the States with Kemi even though she’s desperate to escape her irresistible but married coworker, Ragnar Pettersen, Jonny’s best friend. She acknowledges that her obsession with the powerful Ragnar feels like a “parasite within her, one now attacking every cell that loves Tobias.” But can she quit him?

The third protagonist isn’t refugee/maid Muna Saheed from In Every Mirror She’s Black but rather Yasmiin Çelik, a makeup artist with a loving Turkish-businessman husband, Yagiz, and a baby. When the novel opens, she’s being grilled by police because Muna — in a medically induced coma after a violent incident — has named Yasmiin as her next of kin. The women, both immigrants, met a couple years prior while living in government-subsidized housing. Muna is the only person who knows about Yasmiin’s shameful sex-trafficking past. Would Yasmiin lose everything if Yagiz knew, too?

Åkerström’s vivid characters display clear-eyed insight into their own weaknesses and the messy ethics of their lives. Despite their flaws, they never hesitate to be brave. Brittany begins allowing herself to be vulnerable to the women around her. Kemi comes clean with Tobias. And Yasmiin finally opens up to her husband:

“She recalls a friend who’d done the same, and how she’d ‘held her head high and said without words she was worthy.’ Is this how those fancy women in fashion magazines get spoiled every day?…And in that moment she realizes how much power she already wields in herself and how she holds her future in the palm of her hands.”

Nonetheless, Åkerström never minimizes the limits society places on these women. Yasmiin’s Black Iraqi boss at the hair salon, who’s spent decades absorbing her adopted country’s cultural nuances and ethos, still “isn’t Swedish enough to draw white clientele.” As Yasmiin points out, “assimilation and integration are different beasts. The higher you climb with ease, where you’re not wanted, the less you are who you truly are.” The women come to understand that having everything leaves them hollow. Instead, they must learn to trust — not by digging into others’ secrets, but by trusting others with their own.

With its fast pace and unforgettable cast, Everything Is Not Enough brings to life three remarkable Black women living in a white-dominated society who have no choice but to overcome their emotional scars to reveal their most brilliant selves. In opting for the honest and the real, Brittany, Kemi, and Yasmiin show us that moving toward our dreams is its own worthy direction.

With a B.A. from Colgate University, an M.A. from Georgetown University, both in Russian area studies, and a UCLA certificate in fiction writing, Anne Eliot Feldman has worked in the Library of Congress and the defense industry. She’s currently completing her debut novel about infidelity.

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