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I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (APRIL 2022 EDITION)
Indeed I am.
Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’ve read and enjoyed Nnedi Okorafor’s Africanfuturist novels before, but this is my first time reading one her Africanjuju novels, as well as one of her YA novels. (Note for the uninitiated: Africanfuturism and Africanjuju are the Africa-centric equivalent of SF and fantasy.) This is the first instalment of her Nsibidi Scripts trilogy, which tells the tale of Sunny Nwazue, a 12-year-old girl in Nigeria who is an outsider in every respect – American-born and a black albino (hint: the term “akata” is not a nice one). She’s also had a vision about the end of the world. She is befriended by classmate Orlu and his friend Chichi, who are “Leopard People” (a.k.a. people with magical abilities), and who show Sunny that she also has magical powers.
Because Sunny is a “free agent” (i.e. a Leopard Person who doesn’t come from at least one pure Leopard spiritline), she must be taught how to understand and use her powers. Orlu and Chichi bring her to their teacher Anatov in the secret neighborhood of Leopard Knocks. They are eventually joined by another American-born teenager named Sasha. The story mainly focuses on Sunny learning about the magic world of the Leopard People and her place in it, while in the background a serial killer known as Black Hat Otokoto is targeting children.
Akata Witch gets a lot of comparisons to Harry Potter, although mainly by people who don’t know that there were other books written about young people finding out they’re wizards and going to magic school long before JK Rowling showed up. Like other Okorafor stories, it’s well told, well-paced, and rich in fascinating West African folklore. On the downside, it employs a couple of fantasy tropes I’ve never cared for: (1) the hotheaded protagonist who has to learn things the hard way, and (2) adults giving young people magic lessons and tasks that are potentially lethal, which I’ve never found convincing as a plot device. But then I’m resistant to the fantasy genre in general, and storywise, I found this less compelling than Okorafor’s Africanfuturism tales, so I probably won’t continue this series anytime soon. Still, there’s a lot to like here, so if you dig fantasy, I’d definitely recommend this.
Extinction by Kazuaki Takano
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Also published as Genocide of One (and why Mulholland changed the title I can only guess), this is Kazuaki Takano’s first novel to be translated into English, and I picked it up mainly because the bride read the Chinese translation and said it was pretty good. And the book-jacket synopsis is a pretty good hook: The US government discovers the emergence of an extinction-level threat in the heart of the Congo. Mercenary Jonathan Yeager is hired to lead a team into the DRC to take out the threat – only to discover that the extinction-level threat is a three-year-old child named Akili, an evolved human who possesses superhuman intelligence, and whose race could potentially do to Homo Sapiens what we did to the Neanderthals.
Meanwhile, Japanese grad student Kento Koga gets a message from his recently deceased father that leads him to a secret lab where his father wants him to synthesize a drug that can cure a deadly and incurable form of lung sclerosis – which Yeager’s young son just happens to be dying from. Koga gets to work and finds himself chased by the police and a mysterious woman. Back in DC, Arthur Rubens, an analyst at the Schneider Institute (which produced a report in the 70s that predicted a major leap in human evolution could emerge as a threat to non-evolved humanity) who is advising the operation to assassinate Akili, is trying to sabotage the mission from the inside.
In some ways this is classic potboiler stuff, with lots of tech-science info dumps, plot twists, suspense and occasionally implausible technology. And while the US reaction to Akili’s existence seems a little extreme, Takano’s ace in the hole is that US President Burns is a very thinly disguised Bush 43 who also invaded Iraq on false pretences and renditions brown people to secret facilities to torture them – Takano reckons such an admin would have no moral qualms in murdering a three-year-old to preserve American power. He also has strong feelings about child soldiers in African countries (including the DRC), and the horrors of warfare in general. Consequently, some of the violence is way too graphic for my taste. Some animals don’t fare well either, which is also off-putting for me. That aside, it’s a page-turning adventure as good as anything Michael Crichton ever did.
View all my reviews
The evolution will not be televised,
This is dF
Akata Witch by Nnedi OkoraforMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’ve read and enjoyed Nnedi Okorafor’s Africanfuturist novels before, but this is my first time reading one her Africanjuju novels, as well as one of her YA novels. (Note for the uninitiated: Africanfuturism and Africanjuju are the Africa-centric equivalent of SF and fantasy.) This is the first instalment of her Nsibidi Scripts trilogy, which tells the tale of Sunny Nwazue, a 12-year-old girl in Nigeria who is an outsider in every respect – American-born and a black albino (hint: the term “akata” is not a nice one). She’s also had a vision about the end of the world. She is befriended by classmate Orlu and his friend Chichi, who are “Leopard People” (a.k.a. people with magical abilities), and who show Sunny that she also has magical powers.
Because Sunny is a “free agent” (i.e. a Leopard Person who doesn’t come from at least one pure Leopard spiritline), she must be taught how to understand and use her powers. Orlu and Chichi bring her to their teacher Anatov in the secret neighborhood of Leopard Knocks. They are eventually joined by another American-born teenager named Sasha. The story mainly focuses on Sunny learning about the magic world of the Leopard People and her place in it, while in the background a serial killer known as Black Hat Otokoto is targeting children.
Akata Witch gets a lot of comparisons to Harry Potter, although mainly by people who don’t know that there were other books written about young people finding out they’re wizards and going to magic school long before JK Rowling showed up. Like other Okorafor stories, it’s well told, well-paced, and rich in fascinating West African folklore. On the downside, it employs a couple of fantasy tropes I’ve never cared for: (1) the hotheaded protagonist who has to learn things the hard way, and (2) adults giving young people magic lessons and tasks that are potentially lethal, which I’ve never found convincing as a plot device. But then I’m resistant to the fantasy genre in general, and storywise, I found this less compelling than Okorafor’s Africanfuturism tales, so I probably won’t continue this series anytime soon. Still, there’s a lot to like here, so if you dig fantasy, I’d definitely recommend this.
Extinction by Kazuaki TakanoMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Also published as Genocide of One (and why Mulholland changed the title I can only guess), this is Kazuaki Takano’s first novel to be translated into English, and I picked it up mainly because the bride read the Chinese translation and said it was pretty good. And the book-jacket synopsis is a pretty good hook: The US government discovers the emergence of an extinction-level threat in the heart of the Congo. Mercenary Jonathan Yeager is hired to lead a team into the DRC to take out the threat – only to discover that the extinction-level threat is a three-year-old child named Akili, an evolved human who possesses superhuman intelligence, and whose race could potentially do to Homo Sapiens what we did to the Neanderthals.
Meanwhile, Japanese grad student Kento Koga gets a message from his recently deceased father that leads him to a secret lab where his father wants him to synthesize a drug that can cure a deadly and incurable form of lung sclerosis – which Yeager’s young son just happens to be dying from. Koga gets to work and finds himself chased by the police and a mysterious woman. Back in DC, Arthur Rubens, an analyst at the Schneider Institute (which produced a report in the 70s that predicted a major leap in human evolution could emerge as a threat to non-evolved humanity) who is advising the operation to assassinate Akili, is trying to sabotage the mission from the inside.
In some ways this is classic potboiler stuff, with lots of tech-science info dumps, plot twists, suspense and occasionally implausible technology. And while the US reaction to Akili’s existence seems a little extreme, Takano’s ace in the hole is that US President Burns is a very thinly disguised Bush 43 who also invaded Iraq on false pretences and renditions brown people to secret facilities to torture them – Takano reckons such an admin would have no moral qualms in murdering a three-year-old to preserve American power. He also has strong feelings about child soldiers in African countries (including the DRC), and the horrors of warfare in general. Consequently, some of the violence is way too graphic for my taste. Some animals don’t fare well either, which is also off-putting for me. That aside, it’s a page-turning adventure as good as anything Michael Crichton ever did.
View all my reviews
The evolution will not be televised,
This is dF