skygiants

Last month I reread Nnedi Okorafor's Akata Witch for book club, and then I remembered that Akata Warrior was out now so I read that too, and it turns out it is (imo) a better book than Akata Witch which is already pretty fun.

Akata Witch introduces Sunny Nwazue, an albino Nigerian-American adolescent who discovers after moving back to Nigeria that she's part of a parallel magical society known as Leopard People. The story follows some fairly standard beats - Bullied Kid Discovers She's Secretly Magic, Makes Team of Magic Friends, Plays Magic Sports, Finds Magic Mentor, Defeats Magic Evil. It also follows some non-standard beats; for example, when Sunny finds a guidebook on How To Navigate Magic Land As An Outsider With Non-Magic Parents -- a guidebook which provides both Sunny and the reader a lot of helpful worldbuilding information -- she learns several chapters later about all the prejudices held by the guidebook's author that means everything within it has to be taken with a grain of salt. Nnedi Okorafor's interest in biased narrators and unreliable texts is something I consistently appreciate about her.

Akata Warrior is better, or at least more interesting to me, because it engages a lot more with Sunny's non-magical family (whom she's not allowed to tell about her magic powers) and the in-between-ness of her attempts to live with one foot in each world. In particular I am REALLY FOND of her stupid jock oldest brother, who gets into stupid jock trouble at college from which Sunny has to rescue him -- I love sibling stories in pretty much every configuration, but 'little sister rescues dumb older brother from his own own stupidity' is not a situation I feel like I see particularly often in fiction, and it is both refreshing and delightful.

AND THEN THERE'S A TERRIBLE SIBLING + MAGIC FRIENDS ROAD TRIP.

...and then Sunny and her friends defeat some more magic evil, in a magic battle that's a bit cooler than the magic battle in the last book and also features the gang making friends with an asshole flying animal companion, which is all good but honestly the squabbling magical road trip is a thousand percent what I'm here for.

(I am less thrilled about the endless love triangle between Sunny's brother and her friends Chichi and Sasha (the brilliant hothead members of the party), but on the other hand Sunny is ALSO so annoyed by it all the time that it makes her a very relatable narrator?)

I recently reread Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death. It remains an onslaught of a book, although being somewhat braced for the barrage of ANGER INJUSTICE GENOCIDE GONNA DESTROY A WHOLE CITY NOW does allow a little more time to, uh, stop and appreciate the occasional non-fraught thing that happens along the way? Onyesonwu makes friends with a camel at one point! That's nice!

(...for the record, my review from 2010 seems to indicate that at the time I understood and appreciated what happened at the end. Well, good job, past self, because my present self has no idea. ( Spoilers ))

Anyway! Rereading Who Fears Death got me thinking about the kind of books that are constructed around an ancient lore or a knowledge of the world that turns out to be fundamentally wrong, cultures constructed around poisoned lies. The Fifth Season is the other immediate example that springs to mind of a book like this -- not that there aren't other parallels between The Fifth Season and Who Fears Death. It seems to me that I ought to be able to think of more, but since I can't I'm sure you guys can.

When I mentioned this to genarti, she immediately said "YA dystopia! Fallout!" and that's true, a lot of dystopias are built around a Fundamentally Flawed Premise that has been imposed upon the innocent population by a dictatorial government. Those feel a little different to me, though, maybe just because that sort of dystopia very clearly grows out of our own world. We know from the beginning how to judge truth and lies, we're WAY AHEAD of our naive heroine who believes the color blue is evil because the government put an inexplicable ban on it. But Who Fears Death, while it may be set in our future, is in a future so distant from our own that there's no particular tracing back from it, and The Fifth Season is another world altogether, and we don't have any home court advantage over the protagonists as they figure out where the lies are except a belief that something that poisonous has to be wrong; maybe that's the difference.

I CANNOT WAIT to get my hands on Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon, but I can't do that until I'm moved into Boston and can get my Boston library card, so to tide myself over I read Kabu-Kabu, her collection of short stories from last year.

Actually 'from last year' is not really correct -- while the collection was published last year, many of the stories included were written towards the very beginning of Okorafor's career. And ... you can tell! A lot of it definitely reads like very early work. The writing's much more jagged, and many of the stories feel like initial explorations rather than complete works. It's super interesting, though, because you can get a chance to see the themes that show up in the novels developing, and Okorafor's favorite secondary worlds coming together and becoming more thematically solid in various short snapshots throughout.

My favorite thread is a bunch of stories about Windseekers -- people born with the gift of flight -- which it turns out are mostly part of an unpublished novel about a Windseeker named Arro-yo. What's cool about these stories is you get mythology being established and then questioning and problematizing itself; one story introduces the concept of DESTINED REINCARNATED SOULMATES for Windseekers, and in the next you get a pair of destined soulmates who ... pretty much immediately murder each other every time they recognize each other after reincarnating, because having a soulmate ties you down, man! Gotta get rid of that before it's too late!

(Nnedi Okorafor actually wrote in her afterword that she didn't like that story anymore and if rewriting it probably would not have had them actually murder each other. TOO BAD, I LOVED IT.)

A couple of my favorite stories from the collection are actually available online - I want to call out Spider the Artist, at Lightspeed Magazine, about a woman who befriends an oil pipeline guard robot, is one of my favorites in the collection, and The Palm Tree Bandit, at Strange Horizons, about the creation of a legend. But reading them in the context of Kabu-Kabu as a whole is different from reading them alone, I think. It adds context to a lot of Okorafor's other stuff -- even though many of the stories really aren't as strong, taken by themselves.

(Fair warning #1 is that the content rating is pretty much the usual for Okorafor's adult stuff, by which I mean PRETTY HIGH: lots of spousal abuse, gendered violence, rape racism, race-based violence, and imperialism in the collection as a whole. You don't have to brace yourself as much as you do for Okorafor's Who Fears Death, because with Who Fears Death it's just CONSTANT, and Kabu-Kabu will frequently give you a breather with, like, a whimsical story about a trickster spirit. But some bracing nonetheless required.)

(Fair warning #2 is that the one thing about Okorafor's stuff is that nobody is ever anything other than cis and straight, which stands out more when you have, like, 20 chances for somebody in a story not to be, and most of the characters are not twelve..)

Well, if you are used to Nnedi Okorafor's fantastical coming-of-age YA novels, her latest (and first adult novel) Who Fears Death is most emphatically Nnedi Okorafor Darker And Edgier. The book, set in a postapocalyptic Sudan, matter-of-factly presents you with a whole lot without flinching: the protagonist, Onyesonwu, is ostracized as the child of militarized rape; her three best friends are the girls she went through circumcision with; the main plot revolves around Onyesonwu's quest to realize her destiny and stop a genocidal war. I don't mean to say that it's pointlessly grim or gratuitously violent, because gratuitous is definitely not the word, but the point of the book is to talk about these things and all the smaller evils that grow out of them.

The main thing that struck me about this book is that Onyesonwu is one of the angriest Chosen One protagonists I've ever been inside the head of. She's angry at the sorcerer who won't teach her despite her obvious talent because she's female, and she's angry at her boyfriend for learning from him; she's angry at the townspeople who ostracise her because of her background, and she's angry at her friends for not understanding how hard it is for her; she's angry at the whole world for not caring enough about what goes on everywhere else, and she's angry at herself for being angry, and fulfilling the commonly-held belief that a child born of violence will inevitably be violent. Sometimes riding along with Onyesonwu when she unleashes her anger can be incredibly liberating, and sometimes it's exhausting. You're aware, from the beginning, that a happy ending for Onyesonwu herself is unlikely. Happy will be if she completes what she sets out to do, and ends the war that began her.

That being said, the book itself is very balanced in its portrayals of the situations and the characters. Nnedi Okorafor is not shy about her stance as a feminist and activist, and Onyesonwu is clearly angry about a lot of the same things as the author is, but the people who show prejudice aren't demonized; even the Big Bad, Onyesonwu's biological father, has hints of a complicated backstory (which does not in any way excuse his actions). The pacing of the story is much less balanced, and I'm not sure how I feel about the end, which comes in kind of an explosive rush after a long and meandering quest-journey and which I think would work better if it was not such a sudden slam-dunk. But I think it would be worth the read for the experience of Onyesonwu's voice alone.

Today: relatively pleasant and peaceful.

Tomorrow: all hell breaks loose, as I try to do a.) my own work, as scheduled; b.) the work of my immediate supervisor, who is off for a week getting married (which, yay! I am very happy for her, though it means not so much fun for me) and c.) attempt to find occupation the new trainee who has been dubbed by the boss Not Experienced Enough to do anything helpful without immediate supervision that takes up time that I need to do my work and my spuervisor's work. Training, I add, from my vast experience of 1.5 months on the job. All on no food and, more distressingly, no caffeine from sundown tonight until sundown tomorrow.

So, uh, if you see any screaming, flailing or meltdowns from me in the middle of the day tomorrow, don't take me too seriously, is all I'm saying.

Anyways, while I'm here: brief booklogging, since I have gotten behind again. Nnedi Okoborafur-Mbachu's Zahrah the Windseeker is fairly standard YA in plot - girl is Different from peers, nervous and insecure, goes on a successful quest, encounters Strange Things, gains confidence and returns a self-actualized hero - but stands out due to the extremely cool Africa-based AU civilization, which is definitely not something you see enough of in any kind of fantasy lit. It was a fun read but I didn't adore it, I think in large part because it was very much a journey of Self-Discovery and there really wasn't much behind the interpersonal interactions. (Also possibly because I read it shortly after The Sunbird, which despite being similar in the way that it spends much of its time following a young character on a solitary journey of self-discovery manages to put a whole lot of feeling and depth into the relationships that that character has with other people.) However, I will still definitely be reading Okorafor's other published book, partly because I think this one read like a first novel, and, uh, partly because it is recced on the back by Diana Wynne Jones.