#Nnedi Okorafor

[adamnablelittledevil]

HELP

P.S. I'm gonna read them all! This is just to help me decide the order. :D

[neil-gaiman]

I'm in Santa Fe so of course I went down to the picket line outside a local studio. George RR Martin was there too, and I got to see Paris, George's better half, as well. So was incredible author Nnedi Okorafor who had driven in from Arizona to be on the picket line.

[good-books-to-read]

Travel Destination: Nigeria

Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun by Tolá Okogwu

Onyeka has always been uncomfortable with her hair, people always stare and whisper behind her back, until her best friend nearly drowns and her hair comes to life and saves her.

Her mother reveals a shocking truth Onyeka’s psycho-kinetic powers make her a Solari, one of a secret group of people with super powers unique to Nigeria, where she’s sent to train, however she’ll soon have to put her powers to the test against a battle between truth and lies.

Noor by Nnedi Okorafor

AO has never really felt...natural, and that's putting it lightly. Her parents spent most of the days before she was born praying for her peaceful passing because even in-utero she was "wrong". But she lived. Then came the car accident years later that crippled her even further. Yet instead of viewing her strange body the way the world views it, as freakish, unnatural, even the work of the devil, AO embraces all that she is: A woman with a ton of major and necessary body augmentations. And then one day she goes to her local market and everything goes wrong.

War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi

In a war torn futuristic Nigeria ravaged by climate change and nuclear disasters, where the lucky ones have left the planet and those left survive using mechs, bionic limbs and artificial organs to protect against the harsh environment.

Two sisters dream of more, peace, hope and a future together, and they willing to fight an entire war to get there.

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

Twelve-year-old Sunny lives in Nigeria, but she was born American. Her features are African, but she's albino. She's a terrific athlete, but can't go out into the sun to play soccer. There seems to be no place where she fits in.

And then she discovers something amazing--she is a free agent with latent magical power. Soon she's part of a quartet of magic students, studying the visible and invisible, learning to change reality. But will it be enough to help them when they are asked to catch a career criminal who knows magic too?

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

When a massive object crashes into the coast of Lagos, 3 peoples life are intertwined, Adaora the marine biologist, Anthony a rapper famous through Africa and Agu a troubled solider.

In a race against time to save a country they love and the world itself.

[whilereadingandwalking]

It was amazing seeing Nnedi Okorafor speak at Call & Response Books about her new book Death of the Author, a Hyde Park-based book about a disabled professor who's life is falling apart, so she starts to pour a sci fi story onto the page. It's a novel within a novel (and a cover under the cover to match—take a peek under the dust jacket!). It's a "very naked" tale, Okorafor's most autobiographical yet.

She shared about the parallels to her own life—a lifelong athlete, at age 19 she needed massive spinal surgery that then left her unable to walk. She found solace in writing her own stories, a story about a girl who could fly. And as she did finally regain sensation and start to walk, she felt robotic, teaching her limbs to walk again. Like a rusted robot (the title of the novel-within-a-novel? Rusted Robots).

She describes her writing process as "disorganized chaos," and says that even for this braided narrative, it just kind of unfolded for her, without planning it too tightly. Her characters and world come to her, and feel heavy in her head until she's able to get them out, onto the page. She can only write one novel at a time—once, she was writing one and another came into her head, so she drew it as art "like a compressed file" to come back to later. This novel surprised her, too—she keeps finding details in it she didn't consciously plan.

[anditendshowyoudexpect]

I can’t be normal, so I’ll be something else.

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

[ofliterarynature]

TBR TAKEDOWN: GOODREADS, WEEK 8b

Akata Witch (The Nsibidi Scripts #1) by Nnedi Okorafor

I'm trying to trim down my tbr list(s) and I'm asking for your help! Descriptions and more info under the cut. Please reblog and add your thoughts!

* * * * *

Akata Witch weaves together a heart-pounding tale of magic, mystery, and finding one's place in the world.

Twelve-year-old Sunny lives in Nigeria, but she was born American. Her features are African, but she's albino. She's a terrific athlete, but can't go out into the sun to play soccer. There seems to be no place where she fits in. And then she discovers something amazing--she is a free agent with latent magical power. Soon she's part of a quartet of magic students, studying the visible and invisible, learning to change reality. But will it be enough to help them when they are asked to catch a career criminal who knows magic too?

Ursula K. Le Guin and John Green are Nnedi Okorafor fans. As soon as you start reading Akata Witch, you will be, too

Date added: 2017

Goodreads: 4.03

Storygraph: 4.01

PRO:

Liked Okorafor's Binti series

Magic school quartet?!

Entire series available from the library in my preferred format (audiobook)

CON:

YA/MG, younger than I typically look for these days

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

TBR: Black Authors Spotlight!

In honor of Black History Month, here's a selection of my mountainous TBR--new works by many fave authors (Okorafor, Emezi, Polk, Solomon, Roanhorse, and Giddings), and many others I am hyped to try (shout-out to Ancrum, Monae, and Shawl especially!).

And honorable mention, too, to P. Djèlí Clark and Suyi Davies Okungbowa, who did not make the TBR list only because I read them last month haha.

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #53 – Binti by Nnedi Okarafor

This is one of those works that has been vaguely on my radar for years and years now – I have entirely lost track of the number of places I’ve seen it recommended as some of the best or most original science fiction of the 2010s. So when my hold finally came in on it, I went in more or less blind – which was, frankly, a fatal mistake. I bounced harder off of this than I have very nearly anything I can remember – if it was any longer I probably wouldn’t have bothered finishing the story. I got the whole trilogy as a compendium, and I’m certainly not going to force myself through the rest of it. Which is a shame, because there are plenty of original ideas in there, but (to me, at least) it’s an absolutely brutal failure of form and execution.

The story follows the eponymous Binti, a prodigy and savant in mathematics and the quasi-magical ‘harmonizing’ – creation and manipulation of electric currents. At age 16, she received accepted into the planet-spanning Oomza University and, despite the clear disapproval of her family and her people’s traditional isolationism, she runs away from home and aboard an interstellar transport to take her away. But when the ship is attacked by the Medusae – an alien species with a grudge against the university – a personal keepsake that turns out to be a powerful ancient relic allow her to survive when every other passenger is slaughtered where they stand – and eventually even communicate with the aliens who have seized the ship. She learns that they attacked as part of a plan to steal back their leader’s stinger, and convinces them to let her be their ambassador and attempt to get it through negotiation with the university administration instead. After she proves her willingness to argue on their behalf, they agree – and once they arrive at the university, the administration does as well. Both she and the young Medusae she forged something of a friendship with are welcomed as students, and she has to reckon with the dramatic changes being tested and healed by the medusae caused in her. Fin.

That is much more of a plot summary than I usually write for these things, but I guess my first big issue with the story is just that that’s basically everything that happens in the book? This feels like it could be quite easily cut down to a tight, compelling short story – or else expanded into a full novel, with enough space to give things time to breathe and allow for foreshadowing with more subtlety than a sledgehammer to the face. As is, the story feels both kind of meandering and like the plot beats are a first draft that never had the space to go back and add any real interest or surprise to them.

Which would honestly have been far more forgivable if not for the prose. This is shelved as young adult but in terms of sentence complexity and the way things are phrased it honestly feels closer to middle grade? Or, at least, every sentence was very simple and very explicit and direct, in a way that I quickly found clunky and then intensely grating to read. A friend described it as reading like it was translated from a different language, which doesn’t seem to be the case but I honestly wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Everything is also just thematically very convenient, I guess? Not even that the random relic Binti found in the sand as a child and keeps as a good luck charm turns out to be a hyper-advanced technological plot device, but that for unclear reasons the otjize dye that she (and the very real Namibian Himba ethnic group she’s a member of) use to plait and colour hair is to the Medusae a miraculous panacea which heals scars none of their own technology (capable of creating interspecies hybrids and inducing mutations with a single injection) could touch. Which is a level of thematic bluntness that’s just much more fitting for a children’s story than what I went into this expecting or hoping for.

I could go on, but there’s not really any point – to be positive, the worldbuilding hinted at is intriguing and evocative like absolutely everyone says it is. The whole reading experience was just a terrible failure of marketing, I think – I can’t recall the last time I read a book I ostensibly should have liked that is quite so forcefully Not For Me. Which is odd, because I actually quite enjoyed the other novella of Okorafor I read. But then, Remote Control was written six years later and for an adult audience.

[wearethekat]

January Book Reviews: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

One of my anticipated new releases for this year. In Death of the Author, struggling literature professor Zelu writes a SF novel in a fit of despair which becomes an unexpected hit, catapulting Zelu to stardom. Meanwhile, in interludes set in an apocalyptic wasteland where only robots are left on Earth, an android sets out on a quest to save the planet.

From the very beginning, this is a novel that assumes the role of a postmortem, with POV sections from characters close to Zelu reflecting on their relationship with her in the form of excerpts from an interview. It makes Zelu's future fame and eventual end feel like an approaching disaster. I was immediately taken with Zelu's character. She's prickly, strong-minded, and has a difficult relationship with her loving but overbearing Nigerian-American family. Her legs have been paralyzed from the age of 12 and she uses a wheelchair. She seems to despise all of her former students. She's got an on and off relationship with a man she connects to intellectually but is reluctant to marry. Overall, a complex and compelling portrayal.

However! I found the SF portions to be by far the weakest parts in the novel. It's always difficult to write someone as a once in a generation genius poet or musician or author and then have to convincingly portray that genius on page. I liked the SF storyline far less than the sections of the novel about Zelu. The conflict between the AIs who shunned the history of humanity and the humanoid androids was simplistic. The threat to the Earth was not very realistic or believable. The robot characters were flat, especially in comparison to vibrant Zelu.

Excellent near future literary fiction, but skippable SF.

[lizard-reads-the-world]

Ooh, I got first dibs at the library!

I wonder if it will be strange going from Who Fears Death (2010) as my first Okorafor straight to her latest?

[gennsoup]

They say that when faced with a fight you cannot win, you can never predict what you will do next. But I'd always known I'd fight until I was killed.

Nnedi Okorafor, Binti

[living400lbs]

"Zelu huffed, turning back toward the view. “Is it hard to be you?”

“Not anymore,” she said. “But getting here was. I’m fifty-six years old.”

“What? Really?” Zelu had been sure that Wind was a year or two older than her, if she was older at all. Suddenly she understood why she didn’t like Wind. The woman saw right through her in a way that most did not. Some of that definitely had to do with her age.

....

“It took me twenty-five years to get to this point. I used to work for NASA. Still do sometimes, but I let things go, put things into place, made the hard decisions, and moved. I did it. It was scary, difficult, my family thought I was crazy, even Marlo needed to be convinced. There was so much to do to get where I wanted to be. But eventually, I got here. One thing at a time. Perspective.” She nodded to herself. “Don’t get lost in the woods, Zelu"

- from Death of the Author by Nnedi Okafor

[gollancz]

Gollancz has signed Nnedi Okorafor’s "tour-de-force", the Death of the Author. Death of the Author is an "exhilarating" story about a disabled Nigerian American woman who writes a science fiction novel that becomes a bestselling phenomenon, but her success comes at a price. Billed as a "sweeping narrative" for fans of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow,Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the story is "a multi-threaded meta drama examining the relationship between storyteller and audience". 

Okorafor said: “Death of the Author is the most ambitious and naked work I’ve ever written. I’m so proud of it. I’ve been writing it in my head for 30 years. It brings together so many of my many parts, my contradictions, fusions and my weirdness. The title comes from a famous essay by French scholar Roland Barthes, an essay that I’ve always loathed but also chewed on throughout my years working on my PhD in literature. I want readers to come away from this novel with questions, answers, and a refreshed love of what we as human beings are and what we’re capable of. Also, I wanted to tell a really good story.” 

We're so delighted to have Nnedi joining the Gollancz family with this phenomenal, layered and poetic novel. Which also has robots.

[razreads]

Just because something isn't surprising doesn't mean it's easy to deal with.

Nnedi Okorafor, Binti

[zippocreed501]

AUTHOR EXTRAORDINAIRE

'I would try to write 'realistic' fiction, and someone would fly, or there would be a black hole full of demons or a girl who attracted frogs.'

'People get inspired to write, paint, draw, sing, sculpt, dance in many different ways. And there are many types of art. But the one thing that they all have in common is that they are all a sort of magic. Sometimes the magic flows from one’s fingers, other times it is transferred to the person who experiences the result. Magic has always worked in mysterious ways.'

'It's more fun to write villains. They are more of a challenge, and I get a sick kind of pleasure out of delving into their minds. There's rarely emptiness, and there is almost always deep intelligence.'

'I grew up reading Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Isaac Asimov's nonfiction books, and Roald Dahl.'

'I love writing about monsters and food.'

'I see the world as a magical place. Therefore, it was only natural that magic wafted from my fiction like smoke.'

Author Extraordinaire Nnedi Okorafor

[laurabwrites]

She Who Knows by Nnedi Okorafor

So uh, I read a book today. A whole book (novella length I think). I'd put She Who Knows on hold through my local library and it became available mid-December. Somehow I'd missed that notification or forgot about it. Luckily I logged into my account and spotted it was available 2 days before the hold expired. I grabbed that ebook the next day, yes I did. Even though I technically have it until mid-February, almost missing the hold got me nervous I wouldn't finish before it was due. So I decided to read it before continuing The Way of Kings and started it during my lunch break. Aaand now I'm finished.

She Who Knows is a prequel novella to One Way Witch and I can attest it stands alone. I'm sure of that because I haven't read One Way Witch yet. I plan to, just haven't yet.

The world building was clear and lovely. The mix of the fantasy and technology was handled deftly, as simply how the world was, like anyone growing up in the world would. The magic was understated and felt like organic discovery, not a technical explanation laided out in a chunk.

I did feel a bit like the main character was acting older than their stated age throughout the book, but not enough that I didn't buy the characterization. And then at the end I found out the story was being told in retrospect by the main character as an older adult and everything felt consistent.

Good book/character study of the main character's early life. 4/5 and I'm looking forward to reading book 2.