Nnedi Okorafor

I grew more and more disappointed with the Binti series as successive volumes were published: I just couldn't maintain my willing suspension of disbelief.

Throughout the series main character Binti acquires more and more pseudo-magical mental abilities. She starts off being able to do "treeing" (which appears to be a mix between concentration help, visualisation technique, sub-conscious processing capacity, and actual magic. It's never really explained.). An encounter with an alien race show more rewrites part of her dna, and so she becomes part alien, gaining telepathy and other psy-like powers. Then it turns out she's descended from another alien race, whose earthly kindred are capable of a pseudo-magical telepathy that is presented like a mental Instant Messaging programme, complete with relaying attached files, and she starts accessing those skills. There are more; I am not going to mention them all.

In the end, Binti unites so many superhuman and alien capabilities that the whole thing caves in on itself. None of her magical skills are adequately explained; they are not really differentiated either, and -- this is where I check out -- they all become interchangeable. Plot developments cease to have meaning, because anything that happens to or around Binti can be explained by appealing to at least three or four sets of magical abilities that can come into play. And so it's no longer important why or how things happen the way they do: the answer is an undifferentiated "because of interchangeable magical nonsense." At that point, any semblance of plot, tension, relevance or storytelling evaporates -- none of it means anything anymore.

Binti ended up turning into a cheap, massively overpowered Mary Sue; an interesting Afrofuturist series left me with a sense of worst-of-YA-fanfic. Disappointing. show less

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: An award-winning literary author presents her first foray into supernatural fantasy with a novel of post- apocalyptic Africa.

In a far future, post-nuclear-holocaust Africa, genocide plagues one region. The aggressors, the Nuru, have decided to follow the Great Book and exterminate the Okeke. But when the only surviving member of a slain Okeke village is brutally raped, she manages to escape, wandering farther into the desert. She gives birth to a show more baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand and instinctively knows that her daughter is different. She names her daughter Onyesonwu, which means "Who Fears Death?" in an ancient African tongue.

Reared under the tutelage of a mysterious and traditional shaman, Onyesonwu discovers her magical destiny-to end the genocide of her people. The journey to fulfill her destiny will force her to grapple with nature, tradition, history, true love, the spiritual mysteries of her culture-and eventually death itself.


My Review: Who fears Death? I suppose most living things fear death. Onyesonwu, our title character, is the product of a genesis no one should have to carry with them: She is a child of rape, a product of brutality that should have made her mother hate her. Instead, her mother names her “who fears death” and never from that moment on, despite the both of them being outcast and made into The Other, never fears anything again.

I had a very hard time with this book, wanting to Pearl Rule it on average three times per reading session. I did in fact abandon it when a major major major anti-man hot button issue occurred near the end. But this is what earns the book four stars from me: I could not not read the rest. I had to know why what happened, happened.

Am I happy I read it? Not really. It was harrowing for me. I don't like man-bad-woman-good books. There are two unforgivable things in my moral universe: Abusing animals and rape. I'm no fan of supernatural/magjicqkal stuff (Onye's a shapeshifter). What on the surface of the earth persuaded me to read this thing?! I mean, it's even praised by Luis Alberto Urrea forevermore! I shoulda stood home, as the saying goes.

But Dr. Okorafor is a sorceress. She cast a spell on me. She reached out from inside this book and she made sure my brain needed to know this, and needed it so much I'd overcome my prejudices and make it part of my mental furniture.

I will step on her foot if I ever meet the Doctor in person.

She set the book in a post-nuclear-holocaust Africa! I love postapocalyptic fiction! How am I gonna resist that? And she made explicit a disdain for the rotten, evil-souled uses of religion in oppressing and abusing people of all types. I think I purred. I know I smiled.

It's also a joy and a pleasure to me to see women, and women of color, and women of immigrant parentage, enter the lists of American English-language speculative fiction. It makes me feel that this world has a shot at survival after all. Writers are not ignored because of their bodily plumbing or skin color or weird names. (Sorry, but I'm still an old white man, and this lady's name is really seriously weird to me.) This is the world I grew up wanting to live in, and now I get to...for a while anyway...and that, more than any other factor, made me stick with the book long past my usual stop.

Should you read it? Should you turn page after page of non-European-named characters, landscapes bursting with heat and searing miseries of spirit, heroes whose lives are blighted by origins beyond their control?

Yep. show less

I found Akata Warrior more enjoyable and better put together than Akata Witch. Whereas Akata Witch felt like a series of incidents loosely strung together with a climax tacked on, Akata Warrior had drive and focus: incidents led to each other in a pretty clear and straightforward way. Sunny needs to help her brother, which leads to a punishment, which leads to a vision, and so on. I also think her character had a more clear throughline as well, in terms of (much like in the Binti books) show more finding her place in a society she doesn't quite fit into thanks to both time spent away from it and physical uniqueness and special abilities.

There's a lot of nice moments and good character touches here. I liked the expanded focus on Sunny's relationships with her family (who felt very one-dimensional in Akata Witch), especially her brother, who runs afoul of confraternity at university and ends up being partially initiated into the world of the magical Leopard People as a result. I also enjoyed the flying giant rat, the strange language of the book Sunny attempts to read, the tangled relationships among the kids, and more. After the first book, I was skeptical about the second, but I would definitely read a third. show less

I'm in one of those places where I want to shout about what a miracle this book is, how people should read it, what we can experience and learn from it. But I also just want to quietly hand it over so each reader can have their own experience with it. I know my experience, but I don't know theirs. And I want their experience to be truly and completely their own.

This book is like the work of a remarkable tapestry-maker, bringing together fibres that seem so distinct from one another that the show more tapestry should be all clash and unease, but instead, under that tapestry-maker's hands it becomes a work in which each strand is essential.

Sorry if this is too metaphysical a review for you, but that's where Death of the Author took me. I encourage you to make your own journey through it. I received a free electronic review copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own. show less