lightreads

The 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

Zahrah the Windseeker by Nnedi Okorafor


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A thirteen-year-old girl journeys into the forbidden greeny jungle to find a cure to save her best friend. Along the way she develops her magic and does some growing up.

It's a very simple story – girl marked by difference takes the first steps into adulthood – and younger than I usually like my young adult. But it's sweet and fun, and the world building is great (computers grown on trees! A dietary supplement for charisma!). And it does make me happy to remember there actually are young adult books with brown-skinned protagonists out there. Astonishing, I know.

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