Title: The Book of Phoenix
Author: Nnedi Okorafor
Genre: Science Fiction
Trigger Warnings: Fire (severe), torture, medical experimentation, confinement, body horror, suicide, death, death of parent, child abuse, cancer (mention), sexual content (brief)
Back Cover:
A fiery spirit dances from the pages of the Great Book. She brings the aroma of scorched sand and ozone. She has a story to tell….
Phoenix was grown and raised among other genetic experiments in New York’s Tower 7. She is an “accelerated woman”—only two years old but with the body and mind of an adult, Phoenix’s abilities far exceed those of a normal human. Still innocent and inexperienced in the ways of the world, she is content living in her room speed reading e-books, running on her treadmill, and basking in the love of Saeed, another biologically altered human of Tower 7.
Then one evening, Saeed witnesses something so terrible that he takes his own life. Devastated by his death and Tower 7’s refusal to answer her questions, Phoenix finally begins to realize that her home is really her prison, and she becomes desperate to escape.
But Phoenix’s escape, and her destruction of Tower 7, is just the beginning of her story. Before her story ends, Phoenix will travel from the United States to Africa and back, changing the entire course of humanity’s future.
Review:
I have read several of Nnedi Okorafor’s books at this point and enjoyed almost all of them. I encountered Who Fears Death a while ago, but didn’t think it sounded all that interesting. Then I discovered this one, a prequel to Who Fears Death, and thought it did sound interesting. (My love of the Maximum Ride books in middle school means I’m still a sucker for characters grown in labs to have superhuman abilities.)
It’s easy for me to fall into the temptation to compare all books like this to the Maximum Ride series – especially in this case, where our lab-grown super-powered protagonist has wings, escapes from said lab, and has people from that lab constantly chasing her. But comparing The Book of Phoenix and Maximum Ride does The Book of Phoenix a disservice. The Maximum Ride series are cool books, full of action and adventure and epic characters with wings and a little bit of romance – a perfect formula for a YA bestseller. The Book of Phoenix is darker, angrier, an africanfuturism apocalyptic sci-fi with an all-POC main cast full of love and loss, pain and death, technology and superhuman abilities and the desire to cleanse the world of people who would treat their fellow humans like objects, by fire if necessary. If you loved Maximum Ride in middle school and became a leftist when you grew up, this is the book you wish Maximum Ride could be.
Phoenix herself is amazing. She reads voraciously and loves taking in new information, but it never crosses her mind that she is a prisoner and being regularly tortured is not a fact of life but a fact of her imprisonment until Saeed dies. She tells the story in first person, narrating it to a listener (which made it an especially great read as an audiobook), and it’s a story of her personal journey. Across the Atlantic ocean twice, from sheltered and mostly-innocent to finding a home and people who accept her, to death and loss and her transformation into an agent of blazing change. As she discovers more she grows more angry and burns hotter and the book never tries to dismiss or soften her rage. The story seems to say that if Phoenix wants to cleanse the world with fire, she is right to do so.
I don’t want to say much about the plot, because Phoenix doesn’t know any of the big picture at the beginning and the plot evolves as she learns more. It’s big and twisty and feels like pulling back the layers of an onion you know is rotting, but with each later you peel away you find the rot goes deeper than you thought. As the reader, I’m wise to the tropes and it didn’t do anything too far outside my expectations, but what it did do was unique enough and Phoenix was such a compelling narrator that it felt like looking at the tropes with new eyes.
Highlight to read spoilers:
The other book by Nnedi I read this year, Remote Control, also featured a glowing alien seed in a box that may or may not have granted magic powers to the protagonist and ended up planted beneath a shea tree. The two books are otherwise very different so it’s weird that they were so similar in this one plot point.
My only real criticism is the sex scene. Phoenix may have the body and mind of a 40-year-old, but she’s only been alive for three years at that point. Plus she enjoys what’s happening but explicitly does not know if it was sex or not. I’m not sure where that falls in terms of informed consent but it definitely fell in my personal “I’m not entirely comfortable with this” zone.
I hadn’t originally planned to read Who Fears Death, but I think I might now. I know that book follows a completely different set of characters and is set after the events of this book, but I liked this one so much that I want to read Who Fears Death anyway.
Bluejay Reads 