The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
Jan. 2nd, 2025 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe Book of Phoenix
3/5. A person in a post apocalyptic landscape comes across a recording of Phoenix’s story, as told by herself. Of her creation by a corporation, her accelerated growth and torture at their hands, and what she does when she escapes them and finds her way into an African identity.
I wish I like Okorafor’s books more than I do. They always sound great, then land noticeably off center of my tastes. Because of the narrative mode it’s in, this book (deliberately, I think) leans hard into ‘all white people are evil and all brown people are good.’ It then complicates the brown people end of that (a little, anyway), leaving the white people end cartoonishly flat. Deliberate, like I said, but not my idea of an enjoyable storytelling device.
Some good revenge here, with the usual accompaniments of ‘what will this revenge make me, the revenger?’ etc. But I won’t remember this in a few months.
Content notes: Imprisonment, medical experimentation, reproductive exploitation, violence, all with a strong racial overtone
3/5. A person in a post apocalyptic landscape comes across a recording of Phoenix’s story, as told by herself. Of her creation by a corporation, her accelerated growth and torture at their hands, and what she does when she escapes them and finds her way into an African identity.
I wish I like Okorafor’s books more than I do. They always sound great, then land noticeably off center of my tastes. Because of the narrative mode it’s in, this book (deliberately, I think) leans hard into ‘all white people are evil and all brown people are good.’ It then complicates the brown people end of that (a little, anyway), leaving the white people end cartoonishly flat. Deliberate, like I said, but not my idea of an enjoyable storytelling device.
Some good revenge here, with the usual accompaniments of ‘what will this revenge make me, the revenger?’ etc. But I won’t remember this in a few months.
Content notes: Imprisonment, medical experimentation, reproductive exploitation, violence, all with a strong racial overtone
no subject
Date: 2025-01-03 07:55 am (UTC)Mmm. This is one of the things I don't like about some grimdark - the good guys have shades of grey but the bad guys are totally evil, and it feels unbalanced.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-05 07:13 pm (UTC)there's also something about Okorafor's prose style that doesn't do it for me, even when I realize they're objectively good. I don't think it's a quality thing, there's a styling thing, the way people talk.