Review: A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

Title: A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

Series: The Salvagers #1

Author: Alex White

Genre: Science Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death (major), blood (major), gore, violence, injury, guns, grief, genocide, war (in the past), betrayal, sexual content (off-page), romantic partner death (in past), murder

Back Cover:

A crew of outcasts tries to find a legendary ship before it falls into the hands of those who would use it as a weapon in this science fiction adventure series for fans of The Expanse and Firefly.

A washed-up treasure hunter, a hotshot racer, and a deadly secret society.

They’re all on a race against time to hunt down the greatest warship ever built. Some think the ship is lost forever, some think it’s been destroyed, and some think it’s only a legend, but one thing’s for certain: whoever finds it will hold the fate of the universe in their hands. And treasure that valuable can never stay hidden for long …

Review:

This is the first novel I’ve read in print format in at least two years. I have read a few physical books and ebooks in that time, but they were all nonfiction or short story collections. Every novel has been an audiobook until this one. And as someone who used to keep a stack of books literally as talk as my waist next to my favorite childhood reading chair and spend hours reading up to seven physical books per week, it’s an absolutely bizarre experience to discover that hard copies in my hand just aren’t as immersive as audiobooks. So I’ll admit that I struggled a lot with this book, largely because of the format.

But that wasn’t the only reason A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe and I had a rough beginning. I’m a lover of speculative fiction, but I’ve always leaned more towards the fantasy side. I have found some really good scifi, especially recently, but cool scifi stuff isn’t enough to keep me interested – I need plot and characters and other stuff to get immersed in. And this book starts off really slow. The “finding a legendary ship” thing is a catalyst for part of the beginning, but it doesn’t really kick in until the middle. I was going to say that the beginning is setup, but it really isn’t. The beginning has stuff happening, just without much of a real focus.

This story has two protagonist: Boots (the washed-up treasure hunter) and Nylah (the hotshot racer). Boots is angry and rude and mean, but I didn’t mind her all that much. She’s not someone I would like to spend time with in real life, but she was fine as a character. Nylah, though, started the book as the kind of cocky, punchable asshole that I really, really hate in real life and in books. She got some character growth earlier on that helped, and she was incredibly powerful, so by the end I didn’t mind her, but the beginning was difficult. There’s also a host of other characters, including a spaceship crew who definitely get enough page time and development to be called secondary protagonists, but who I don’t really have much to say about. They’re all good, don’t get me wrong – I don’t think there’s a single weak or badly-done character in this book – but there’s nothing to say about them that could add to this review.

The world was an interesting fusion of scifi and magic. It’s your classic spacefaring, mutli-planet, fancy tech, faster-than-light spaceship travel kind of intergalactic science fiction world, but also a world where almost everyone has some type of magic and magic can be used to fuse with, alter, power, and enhance technology as well as just doing straight magic stuff. And the fusion was great. It was cool seeing cybersecurity as a psychic battle between people with tech magic and an evolving AI defense system. It made for some badass fight scenes. And really, it gave my fantasy-loving side something to really enjoy in this otherwise fairly ordinary scifi world and made the whole thing that much better.

Now, you might get this far and think, So this is a pretty solidly okay book, right? And you’d be wrong. This is a really, really good book. And the reason is because somewhere in the middle, the whole “hunting the legendary missing ship” thing finally kicks in. And I loved it. When it starts, the reasons for wanting to find the ship are small – Boots is trying to save her own skin, the rest of the crew wants a payday, and Nylah didn’t even want to be involved but got dragged along for the ride. But as they journey across the universe, exploring massive and unsettling abandoned places (my favorite) and getting chased by an unbelievably powerful assassin, they begin to put together a deadly conspiracy with its roots in a genocidal war decades earlier and its culmination fast approaching. It was thrilling, engaging, and brilliant, plenty of scenes with the absurdly powerful protagonist trope that I adore … I loved it deeply and read it in two sittings. Whatever else my criticisms of the book, once the plot got rolling it really got rolling.

Is A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe perfect? Definitely not. And there’s some things that I just didn’t like about it (e.g. Nylah at the beginning) that other readers may not find irritating or may even like. But the details are great, the world is pretty neat, and once the plot gets going it’s absolutely fantastic. On the whole it’s a very good book. But I don’t intend to read the rest of the series. Part of that is because everything seems to imply that the rest of the series is focused on dealing with the rest of the people involved in the big conspiracy, and that just sounds less interesting to me. And part of it is because this book wrapped up really well. There’s definitely room for a sequel, but it doesn’t feel like it requires one. It was a good, satisfying adventure, and I feel no need to read on.

The Salvagers series:

1. A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe
2. A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy
3. The Worst of All Possible Worlds

Review: Harrow the Ninth

Title: Harrow the Ninth

Series: The Locked Tomb #2

Author: Tamsyn Muir

Genre: Science Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Body horror (extreme), injury (extreme), blood (severe), gore (severe), unreality (severe), grief, child death, murder, parent death, mental illness/psychosis, suicide (mentions)

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to spoilers of the previous book, Gideon the Ninth.

Back Cover:

She answered the Emperor’s call.

She arrived with her arts, her wits, and her only friend.

In victory, her world has turned to ash.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, last necromancer of the Ninth House, has been drafted by her Emperor to fight an unwinnable war. Side-by-side with a detested rival, Harrow must perfect her skills and become an angel of undeath ― but her health is failing, her sword makes her nauseous, and even her mind is threatening to betray her.

Sealed in the gothic gloom of the Emperor’s Mithraeum with three unfriendly teachers, hunted by the mad ghost of a murdered planet, Harrow must confront two unwelcome questions: is somebody trying to kill her? And if they succeeded, would the universe be better off?

Review:

It’s been three months since I read Gideon the Ninth, so I was prepared for it to take a little bit to get back into the story. I was also expecting it to be a little less enjoyable at the beginning because I wasn’t a huge fan of Harrow last book and I knew she would be the main character this time. So I was prepared to have a rough start.

What I was not prepared for was absolute incomprehensibility.

Some books feel like giant puzzles where the story keeps handing you pieces and it isn’t until the end where you figure out how they all fit together. This book does not feel like that. This book feels like it handed you a large box full of pulpy sludge, then at 74% of the way through the book it casts the spell to turn the sludge into puzzle pieces at which point they come together fairly easily.

If 74% feels like an oddly specific number, that’s because I checked. I looked at the time stamp for when the book started to make sense, because it took a very long time. The first three-quarters of the book are almost entirely incomprehensible. They go hard into the unreality and “unreliable narrator is unreliable because she can’t remember and isn’t sure what she’s seeing is real.” It goes back and forth between Harrow’s new life as a Lyctor and a retelling of book one where Gideon doesn’t exist. The timelines are all mixed up. It’s hard to tell when events are actually supposed to be taking place, and I’m pretty sure both timelines are told out of order anyway (but there’s no temporal markers so it’s hard to tell). It’s a crapshoot if you can figure out who’s speaking or even in the scene at the start. And the bulk of it is told in second person, which really threw me for the first few hours and never stopped feeling weird and jarring.

And after all that, can you guess the moment that made me pause the book and stare into space asking myself if I really just heard what I thought I just heard? It wasn’t the unexpected betrayal, or the murder attempts, or the body under the bed or the weird blood river or the fact that God’s name is John. It was the moment where God was explaining a potential galaxy-ending apocalypse to Harrow and, right in the middle of a serious conversation, made an absolutely serious none pizza left beef reference. Out of all the incomprehensible nonsense that came before, that was the moment where I stopped the book, reconsidered my reading choices, and started wondering what kind of person Tamsyn Muir is to put a fucking meme reference in her elaborate and serious book.

Once I was paying attention, there was a surprising amount of memes and internet culture referenced in a gory and intense drama about necromancers in space. These included a “She wants the D” joke, a pun on the word “barista”, an honest-to-goodness “Hi, _, I’m dad” joke, and references to bone hurting juice and Miette. Am I supposed to be taking this seriously? Every single other thing in the book is very serious – and yet there are no less than five meme/joke references. What am I supposed to think?

I very nearly DNF’d this early on. Gideon was my favorite character and she wasn’t there. I didn’t really like Harrow that much in book one when she was badass, and I liked her even less when she was spending much of her time unconscious and not doing anything when she was awake. The other Lyctors were mean, standoffish, and incredibly unlikeable, and the Emperor was stiff and bland whenever he was on page. And even though I was spending a lot of brainpower trying to figure out what the hell was going on, there was zero plot whatsoever. Harrow wasn’t even doing anything – other people around her did stuff, but she did nothing except walk around, be confused about her own memories, and see things that weren’t there, interspersed with retold scenes from book one, except they were the scenes where very little happened and had no Gideon. There wasn’t even any interesting settings to explore, since instead of cool and creepy planets, this book takes place almost exclusively on a largely nondescript spaceship. Up until about halfway through, I really didn’t like this book.

But I stuck it out, mainly because I wanted to see if I was right in my suspicions (and hopes) that the end of book one would get undone in some way. And around the halfway point, I warmed up a bit to Harrow and the barest hint of a plot kicked in. So I felt mildly validated in pushing through the first half (which was about 10 hours, it’s an almost 20-hour audiobook) and kept reading.

Then the book hit the 74% mark and went from zero to sixty over the course of a few minutes. The book cast the spell that turned my box of fibrous sludge into puzzle pieces, I started slamming those pieces together as fast as my brain could whir, Harrow started to actually do things, a plot (of a sort) finally kicked into gear, and the last 26% of the book was absolutely fantastic. I loved it. I got some of the answers I wanted from book one, I got some answers to questions I didn’t even know I had that just added more twists, there was action, there was drama, there were surprises, some of my suspicions about book one’s ending were validated and some of them were not. It was great.

Was it worth the first half being unenjoyable and another quarter being mediocre? I don’t know. I really don’t know what to make of this book. The last 26% was amazing. The first half was terrible. The book seemed to skip engaging characters or intriguing plot and go straight for “if they don’t understand what’s happening, they’ll want to read on and find out,” but then overdid it so hard that it tipped over into obnoxious and frustrating. But also that ending answered a lot of my questions from book one, which is a large part of what I wanted out of this book, and came with some really stellar action sequences towards the end.

This review is very long because this is a very long book and I do not know what to make of it in the least. I think the first three-quarters could have been cut down to half its length, easily, without harming the story and probably making it better. I pushed through reading the whole thing and I don’t know if it was worth it. The confusing thing is that I definitely didn’t dislike this book. I don’t think I liked it, either. And I’m not even ambivalent about it. I’m having some kind of feeling about Harrow the Ninth, but I have no idea what. My opinions are about as incomprehensible as the majority of this book. I don’t know if I’ll read the next book. Maybe? I’m gonna need some time to untangle the disaster of whatever I feel about this one first.

The Locked Tomb series:

1. Gideon the Ninth
2. Harrow the Ninth
3. Nona the Ninth
4. Alecto the Ninth

Review: Gideon the Ninth

Title: Gideon the Ninth

Series: The Locked Tomb #1

Author: Tamsyn Muir

Genre: Science Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, violence, murder, gore, body horror, cancer, terminal illness, child death, grief, child abuse, self-harm for magic purposes, parent death (mentions), suicide (mentions)

Back Cover:

The Emperor needs necromancers.

The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman.

Gideon has a sword, some dirty magazines, and no more time for undead bullshit.

Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an afterlife as a reanimated corpse. She packs up her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and prepares to launch her daring escape. But her childhood nemesis won’t set her free without a service.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House and bone witch extraordinaire, has been summoned into action. The Emperor has invited the heirs to each of his loyal Houses to a deadly trial of wits and skill. If Harrowhark succeeds she will become an immortal, all-powerful servant of the Resurrection, but no necromancer can ascend without their cavalier. Without Gideon’s sword, Harrow will fail, and the Ninth House will die.

Of course, some things are better left dead. 

Review:

When I picked this book up, I didn’t really remember what it was about. Someone somewhere said it was good (potentially someone back on Goodreads when I still used that), and at this point that’s enough for me to give it a shot.

And whoever it was that gave me that recommendation was right: It was good.

I haven’t read a whole lot of science fantasy, and going into it I didn’t realize it was science fantasy. Due to all the necromancy and such, I assumed it was fantasy. But it’s not – these necromancers are in space. Except for one transit scene, the entire story takes place on the cold and dark planet of the Ninth House or the overgrown flooded ruins of the planet where the trial happens, so the fact that these necromancers are spacefaring necromancers doesn’t much affect the plot. But it does add an interesting element to the science fantasy world.

Honestly, everything about this spacefaring necromancer universe was awesome. I’m always down for a weird and creepy religion, and the Ninth House seems to have cornered the market of making religion weird and creepy. I’m pretty sure they have the same beliefs as everyone else in the solar system, they just take it to wonderfully insane levels. The two planet settings that we get to see in this book are also fantastic. I loved the dark, damp, barren world of the Ninth House, living mostly underground in a giant crack in the surface of a cold, dark planet. And I loved the sun-drenched, flooded, overgrown magic of the mostly-abandoned planet of the trial, which was a completely opposite aesthetic of the Ninth House planet but somehow just as creepy.

And also, I loved Gideon. She’s stereotypical in many ways – the teenager unhappy with her situation and plotting to run away, the protagonist who’s super good at swordfighting, full of stubbornness and sass. But I enjoyed her a lot regardless. I do enjoy highly skilled characters, so she definitely had that going for her. She also had an asshole streak, which could have been annoying, but she was mostly an asshole to Harrow who really deserved it, so I found it endearing.

That said, I did have a few problems with the book. The biggest one was the dynamic between Gideon and Harrow. I knew it would evolve through the book, but it changed weirdly fast. It seemed less an evolving relationship and more a flipped switch because the story wouldn’t work without the dynamic changing. My second issue was the sheer volume of secondary characters in the test – one necromancer and one cavalier from houses two through nine, plus three priests who were overseeing the thing. Seventeen secondary characters are way too many to keep track of, and until the major players became clear, I had a hard time managing them in my head. They were remarkably solid, though, considering how little page time many of them got.

The plot was significantly twistier than expected. It turned out to be a great big puzzle of magical ability and exploring the abandoned overgrown building where the test was held. I enjoyed it very much. It also raised a ton of questions and provided very few answers. I assume there will be more in the next book.

I will definitely read the sequel. The plot of this book seems completely done, but I want the answers to those questions. I also am not entirely sure if I’m happy with the ending of this one and the context of what happens in the next book will help me decide how I felt about the ending of this one. I have a suspicion that what I want to happen won’t actually happen and I won’t like book two nearly as much, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway.

The Locked Tomb series:

1. Gideon the Ninth
2. Harrow the Ninth
3. Nona the Ninth
4. Alecto the Ninth

Review: Iron Widow

Title: Iron Widow

Series: Iron Widow #1

Author: Xiran Jay Zhao

Genre: Science Fantasy (it’s clearly and obviously science fiction but it feels like fantasy)

Trigger Warnings: Misogyny (severe), sexism (severe), child abuse, domestic abuse, death, death of parents, child death, blood, injury, torture, body horror (mild), non-consentual being inside someone’s mind/having someone in your mind, alcohol, alcoholism, suicidal ideation, sexual content

Back Cover:

Pacific Rim meets The Handmaid’s Tale in this blend of Chinese history and mecha science fiction for YA readers.

The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn’t matter that the girls often die from the mental strain.

When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it’s to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister’s death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected—she kills him through the psychic link between pilots and emerges from the cockpit unscathed. She is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises instead.​

To tame her unnerving yet invaluable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest and most controversial male pilot in Huaxia​. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will miss no opportunity to leverage their combined might and infamy to survive attempt after attempt on her life, until she can figure out exactly why the pilot system works in its misogynist way—and stop more girls from being sacrificed.

Review:

I had some reservations about this book going in that had nothing to do with the book itself. The author is a YouTuber that my husband watches (he’s the one who told me about this book), but I haven’t seen any of their videos. I knew nothing about the book besides its back cover. What had me worried is that I put it on hold at my library, which told me that based on the number of people ahead of me it would be about a 17-week wait. Five weeks later, I got a notification that it was ready to borrow. As I told my husband, either it was so good that people were devouring it and finishing it fast or it was so bad that people were giving up fast.

Luckily, the former was the case. This book is fantastic.

It was also very hard to read at many points. Misogyny is something I find it hard to read about, especially when it gets extreme, and everything in the world of Iron Widow is built on misogyny. There is foot-binding in this world. The only use of daughters is selling them off to be wives or die in battle. Chrysalises are the only defense against the invading aliens, and when a man and a woman get into one, only the man will survive.

Zetian is angry and she has every right to be. Her family only cares about the money she can bring in through either a bride price or a war death payment for dying in a Chrysalis. They are only sad about her older sister’s death because she was murdered outside of a Chrysalis and therefore her family didn’t get the payment. Her father and grandfather are violent and abusive, her mother and grandmother are cowed, and she knows they do not love her. If they want to sell her to her death anyway, the death penalty for killing the male pilot who murdered her sister won’t be anything worse.

This acceptance of death made her absolutely fearless, and I loved it. The perfect girl is beautiful and silent, moving slowly on her bound feet, obeying every order and taking insults and abuse without complaint. None of the men Zetian encounters have any idea what to do with a girl who has accepted she’s going to die and therefore sees no point in trying to avoid the wrath of men. She is an absolute delight of fury, and I love it when books let girls embrace their rage.

I don’t know if Xiran intended this, but Zetian’s bound feet were relatable disability feels. I don’t have bound feet, but I do have a chronic pain condition that especially likes to screw up my hips, knees, and other joints required for walking, and I absolutely related to the frustration and anger and feeling of being limited that comes with every step hurting, needing a mobility aid like a cane to walk longer distances, and knowing that it will never be fixed. I have no idea how much of what’s in the book is accurate to actual footbinding practices, but it was definitely relatable to my experience of mobility- and pain-related disability.

The themes in this book aren’t really subtle, especially the whole thing about a misogynistic society. I absolutely loved the progression of it, though. Zetian knows that there is misogyny in the world and that she and her sister have no worth outside of supporting, serving, and dying for men simply because they’re women. She starts the book blaming individual men, with the goal of murdering the individual man who murdered her sister. But the book takes her along a journey from “individual men are the problem” to “the system is the problem” as she learned more about the individual men and the system.

And if you’re not here for themes – well, I think you’d be missing out on a lot of what makes this book great, but you do get epic mecha battles, magic with a thin veneer of science used to fight invading aliens, psychic fights in a mental realm, good old-fashioned fisticuffs, powerful prisoners with hearts of gold, underdogs teaming up to give the people in charge a gigantic middle finger, a love triangle that ended in the best way possible, and several amazing twists (only one of which I suspected).

This review is already getting long, and I haven’t even mentioned the rich and complex world-building, the amazing twists, the rich atmosphere, the fantastic relationships between Zetian and the two love interests in the triangle, the minor themes about women who participate in their own oppression, and all the other wonderful things in this book. It’s fantastic. Everything about is dark and gorgeous and burning with fury and flame. I adore this book.

I also recommend checking out the author’s website. There’s character profiles, fanart, and even memes (mild spoiler warning for how the love triangle shakes out, though).

The Iron Widow series:

1. Iron Widow
2. Heavenly Tyrant

Review: The Cerulean

Title: The Cerulean

Series: Cerulean Duology #1

Author: Amy Ewing

Genre: Science Fantasy (my best guess – this is one that’s hard to categorize, because it does have space travel but it’s otherwise fantasy)

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), murder (mentions), suicide, sexism, animal death (mentions), blood (brief)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 18%

Back Cover:

Sera has always felt as if she didn’t belong among her people, the Cerulean. She is curious about everything and can’t stop questioning her three mothers, her best friend, Leela, and even the High Priestess. Sera has longed for the day when the tether that connects her City Above the Sky to the earthly world below finally severs and sends the Cerulean to a new planet.

But when Sera is chosen as the sacrifice to break the tether, she doesn’t know what to feel. To save her City, Sera must throw herself from its edge and end her own life. But something goes wrong and she survives the fall, landing in a place called Kaolin. She has heard tales about the humans there, and soon learns that the dangers her mothers warned her of are real. If Sera has any hope to return to her City, she’ll have to find the magic within herself to survive.

Review:

This book did not grip me from the start. It was very heavy on the YA Heroine tropes and moved very slowly. But I liked some things, so I kept giving it a chance.

Sera is our YA Heroine. She feels like she doesn’t fit in, partially because she doesn’t have any aptitude for her society’s career options even though she’s almost of age. Everyone else views her as weird and agrees she doesn’t fit in, but the only thing actually weird about her is that her favorite thinking spot is at the very top of the temple spire. She has one friend who is perfectly normal and could fit in with the rest of society but chooses to be her friend because she is a kind and gentle person. Her archenemy is a mean girl in her age cohort who is prettier and more talented at the societal career options and is mean to her about it. If you’re keeping track, that description has seven YA Heroine tropes. I’ve read this same situation across so many YA books in high school that it almost completely prevented me from connecting with or caring about Sera.

Sera’s world, however, was fascinating. It’s mostly explained through exposition, which probably would have gotten annoying if it wasn’t the main thing I cared about in the book. Sera’s people are all women, have blue hair and blue blood, they possess magic to heal and to share thoughts and feelings through touch, they live in a migrating city that tethers itself to different planets, and marriages are between three people instead of two. There was a lot of world building and I was really interested in this society.

Plus I knew that things would change drastically once Sera jumped off the city. The story moved slowly and I didn’t really care about Sera, but the Cerulean society kept me interested enough to stick it out under Sera jumped, and I hoped the story would change for the better after that.

Then Sera jumped, and the story changed to a whole new story. Now we’re following a set of twins on the planet, who seem to be living in a fictional version of the 1800s – sexism, railroads, corsets, etc. The twins are a boy whose name I cannot remember who wants to impress his father so he’ll let him be part of the family business (which may be producing plays?), the other is a girl who wants to be a scientist despite girls not being allowed to do that. There’s also some sort of racial/political/religious ideological conflict between their country and another one. I had very little idea what was going on, no idea who these people were, and no incentive to care. If this was who Sera was going to end up dealing with after she survived her fall, I really wasn’t interested.

What really killed my enjoyment of this book was a lack of caring about the characters. Sera hit every female YA Protagonist trope and that immediately distanced me from her despite all the opportunity for connection her situation offered. And just when I was ready for the book to speed up and finally get into the meat of the story – and maybe for the changing situation to give me more reason to care about Sera – it switched to a whole new set of characters who I did not know or care about in a much less interesting world.

I’m actually a little angry because I wanted this to be good. The idea behind the Cerulean and their floating city was what really interested me. There was a lot of potential there and I want to stay there and explore that world. Perhaps if Sera had hit fewer of the tropes (or this had been published years ago when I was more tolerant of YA Heroine tropes) I would have stuck it out longer. I love the idea of the Cerulean people and society, but unfortunately not much else about this book.

The Cerulean Duology:

1. The Cerulean
2. The Alcazar

Review: Remote Control

Title: Remote Control

Author: Nnedi Okorafor

Genre: Science Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, death of parent, death of animals, violence against children, periods, being hit by a car, guns (brief)

Back Cover:

“She’s the adopted daughter of the Angel of Death. Beware of her. Mind her. Death guards her like one of its own.”

The day Fatima forgot her name, Death paid a visit. From hereon in she would be known as Sankofa–a name that meant nothing to anyone but her, the only tie to her family and her past.

Her touch is death, and with a glance a town can fall. And she walks–alone, except for her fox companion–searching for the object that came from the sky and gave itself to her when the meteors fell and when she was yet unchanged; searching for answers.

But is there a greater purpose for Sankofa, now that Death is her constant companion?

Review:

The back cover of this book is kind of misleading, but I don’t really blame it because it would be hard to write a description of what happens in this book that doesn’t sound incredibly boring. There is no greater purpose for Sankofa. But this book isn’t about that. It’s not really about a plot at all. It’s about Sankofa, a girl who can kill with a thought and can’t always control it and whom everyone fears because of it.

This story is, overwhelmingly, a tragedy. It is the story of Sankofa, a child, a young child, losing everything and everyone she knew and cared about again and again and again. The first time this happens she is seven, when she loses her family and her town and her name and everything she ever knew in one moment of disaster. With no home, no name, and no one to help her, she begins chasing something that was stolen from her.

All technology dies under her touch, but she doesn’t even need touch to kill a human. Stories of her spread, and people fear her, and many hate what they fear. She is alone except for her fox companion. Every single refuge she finds is eventually destroyed or she is driven away by those who fear her power of death and hate what they fear. And as I read, all I could think was, She is a child. She is a child. She is seven, eight, nine, ten years old. She is too young for your hate and fear. She does not want to kill you. She is a child who has lost everything too many times to count. Have compassion.

But of course, there are children her age and younger in our real world also who face anger and fear and hatred from adults for something they cannot control and did not choose.

This is not a happy book. It isn’t long, but the emotions it contains are large. This is a small story of big feelings, grief and loss and pain and being a child alone in the world and hated for something you are that you did not ask for, did not choose, and can’t stop being. It is beautiful and vivid and intense and engrossing despite the lack of discernable plot and, above all else, heartbreaking.

Review: Binti: The Night Masquerade

Title: Binti: The Night Masquerade

Series: Binti Trilogy #3

Author: Nnedi Okorafor

Genre: Science Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, mild gore, death of family members, death of parents, fire (mention), loss/destruction of home, mild body horror

Spoiler Warning: This book is the conclusion of a trilogy, and reading beyond this point will expose you to MAJOR spoilers for Binti and Binti: Home.

Back Cover:

Binti has returned to her home planet, believing that the violence of the Meduse has been left behind. Unfortunately, although her people are peaceful on the whole, the same cannot be said for the Khoush, who fan the flames of their ancient rivalry with the Meduse.

Far from her village when the conflicts start, Binti hurries home, but anger and resentment has already claimed the lives of many close to her.

Once again it is up to Binti, and her intriguing new friend Mwinyi, to intervene–though the elders of her people do not entirely trust her motives–and try to prevent a war that could wipe out her people, once and for all.

Review:

Before I get into talking about this book specifically, I want to talk about the Binti Trilogy as a whole. Because this series has the best thematic arc I have ever seen in a series. Binti is about Binti’s identity as part of the Himba people. Her connection to her people is the only reason she survived that book. Binti: Home is about Binti returning to her homeland and struggling as she realizes she is now both Himba and Other. And now Binti: The Night Masquerade is about Binti taking the many, many diverse parts of herself and integrating them into one harmonious whole that is Binti – not Himba and Other, but Himba and More.

The first two books were fantastic but this one was just so emotionally resonant. I can’t even put my finger on exactly what it is but while I adored the first two Binti books, I felt this one.

Binti is struggling in this one. People close to her have died, war is about to break out, and on top of it all she knows she is still Himba but the Himba seem to have rejected her and circumstances keep conspiring to make her feel like she has lost her identity. She feels lost and adrift and at the same time responsible for so many bad things that have happened, but through it all she never stopped fighting. I loved her as a character in the other books, but in this one I loved her as a person.

I feel like I should mention Mwinyi, but he wasn’t important. He was there, and part of a barely-there romance that felt a little forced, but he (and the other characters, like Okwu) were important to the plot but not to the heart of the story. The emotional journey in this book belongs to Binti and Binti alone, and her vibrant character made everyone else recede into the background.

Normally I say a lot more about the plot. There was a plot, and honestly a pretty good one – stop the war brewing between the Koush and the Meduse. But somehow the fate of Binti’s homeland (pretty much guaranteed to be destroyed in the crossfire if war breaks out) pales in comparison to Binti’s emotional arc. There is a plot, which is very good and legitimately surprised me with how it ended, but Binti: The Night Masquerade is about character, not plot.

My only criticism of the story was that the ending seemed a little anticlimactic. I didn’t hate it, though – Binti herself pointed it out, making it seem a little bit self-aware – and the ending made me think about how ordinary life keeps going on after the interesting plot of the story ends. It’s not what you expect from a story, especially one as full of drama and science-magic as this one, but it was different and I think I liked it.

And as a fun little side note: I have no idea if Nnedi Okorafor intended this at all, but I discovered while studying Arabic that in Arabic, “binti” translates to “my daughter.” Considering how much of this trilogy is about family and Binti’s place as a “daughter” of the Himba, I thought that was really cool.

The entire Binti trilogy is amazing, and I absolutely loved the first two books, but this one outshone them both. It’s rare that the last book is the best in a series, but I think this one is. I do not have enough good things to say about Binti.

The Binti Trilogy:

1. Binti
2. Binti: Home
3. Binti: The Night Masquerade

Review: Binti: Home

Title: Binti: Home

Series: Binti Trilogy #2

Author: Nnedi Okorafor

Genre: Science Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death (mention), blood (mention), trauma flashbacks

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series and this review contains spoilers of book one. Read my review of book one here.

Back Cover:

It’s been a year since Binti and Okwu enrolled at Oomza University. A year since Binti was declared a hero for uniting two warring planets. A year since she abandoned her family in the dawn of a new day.

And now she must return home to her people, with her friend Okwu by her side, to face her family and face her elders.

But Okwu will be the first of his race to set foot on Earth in over a hundred years, and the first ever to come in peace.

After generations of conflict can human and Meduse ever learn to truly live in harmony?

Review:

I love how rich and beautiful this world is.

In this book, Binti goes home, back to her family and the Himba people on Earth, and realizes just how much she’s changed. This story is not so much about the conflict between humans and Meduse. This story is about Binti coming home and realizing that though family and culture is everything to her, she no longer fits in.

It’s intense and it’s beautiful. One of the biggest elements of Binti’s character in Binti was how important her culture is to her, and it was her connection to that culture that saved her life. Now she comes home and realizes that leaving to follow her dreams is nearly unforgiveable to her people. They struggle to react to her and how she’s changed. She doesn’t fully fit in anymore.

This book is very emotional and the emotions are vivid and strong. I felt for Binti, and I felt with Binti, and her experience actually mapped surprisingly well to my experience moving back in with my family after my first year of college. This was an engaging book and I’m so glad I had the experience of reading it.

I also want to touch on the world-building a little, because the Binti books have some of the best world-building I’ve ever encountered. The culture of the Himba and the other cultures that Binti encounters are so vividly drawn and uniquely imagined. I adore it. I want to spend as much time as possible in this world and learn everything about it. My only criticsm of this story is that the books are short, more novella than novel, and I want so much more.

The Binti Trilogy:

1. Binti
2. Binti: Home
3. Binti: The Night Masquerade

Review: Binti

Title: Binti

Series: Binti Trilogy #1

Author: Nnedi Okorafor

Genre: Science Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, stingers/being stung, mild body horror

Back Cover:

Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs.

Knowledge comes at a cost, one that Binti is willing to pay, but her journey will not be easy. The world she seeks to enter has long warred with the Meduse, an alien race that has become the stuff of nightmares. Oomza University has wronged the Meduse, and Binti’s stellar travel will bring her within their deadly reach.

If Binti hopes to survive the legacy of a war not of her making, she will need both the gifts of her people and the wisdom enshrined within the University, itself — but first she has to make it there, alive.

Review:

This book (the entire Binti trilogy, actually) is April’s book club pick, so I checked this out from the library without really looking at it too closely. It surprised and delighted me with how great it is.

For as short as this book is, the worldbuilding is fantastic, but it’s integrated so seamlessly into the story that I can’t even discuss it as a separate thing. Himba culture is essential to who Binti is, and it’s also essential to the plot, so you learn about it as it makes sense.

As someone who is largely disconnected from their family and doesn’t have any cultural practices that aren’t the dominant cultural practices of my area, I loved seeing how important Binti’s cultural practices were to her. (And I’ll admit, they were also unique and seemed exotic to me, and therefore interesting.) Despite going against Himba tradition and her family’s wishes to go to Oomza Uni, Binti’s cultural practices made her feel comfortable and safe and connected. She also has strong mathematical talents, which is what got her accepted to Oomza in the first place. Even though she’s so different from me, though, her emotions came off the page realistically and she was great.

The story in this book takes place on the ship transporting Binti from Earth to Oomza Uni. The ship is attacked by Meduse, and she has to figure out how to survive the alien attacks. Obviously she does, since there’s two more books in the series, but it’s how she survives that makes it great. You will not guess how she does it, and it’s not because she has any special heroicness or fighting skills – she has very real emotions and limitations and is just making the best choices she can in a very bad situation. I adored the uniqueness of it and I adored how real it felt, despite being a book about aliens.

The only bit that didn’t really make sense was the math. Binti is a “harmonizer,” which I think is some sort of math genius with a side of math meditation that’s a little magic? I don’t understand it very well, but I’m hoping it will be explained more in the next book.

I am definitely planning on reading the rest of the series. This book was great and if the next two are anything like this one, I’ll enjoy them immensely.

The Binti Series:

1. Binti
2. Binti: Home
3. Binti: The Night Masquerade

Webcomic Spotlight: Lady of the Shard

Title: Lady of the Shard

Author: Gigi D.G.

Genre: Science Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Manipulation in mildly sexual situations, mind control, mild body horror

Summary:

Lady of the Shard is a comic about an acolyte in love with the goddess she serves.

Review:

“Lady of the Shard” is short, but a whole lot happens! It starts off with a cute, overeager acolyte falling in love with the goddess she serves, and trying to deal with her complicated feelings about it. Things change when a monster (that’s actually not a monster) shows up … and that’s all that I can really say without spoilers, but there are several twists.

Also, the art is really cool and different – it’s very sketch-like, and white on a black (or occasionally pink) background.

And in my opinion, it looks really cool.

And did I mention this all takes place in space? The goddess saved humanity after the earth was destroyed, and so all the people living near the various stars bring tribute to her temple, which is a giant star-shaped thing floating in space. Despite that, though, it has a definite fantasy feeling.

“Lady of the Shard” is a great story with more action than you’d expect, an amazing antagonist, and a completely adorable protagonist. It’s a quick read, and in my opinion, totally worth it.

You can read it online for free here! (May not work well with mobile devices.)