Noor

 

For my first book of 2022, I decided to read Noor by Nnedi Okorafor, one of the library books I have out.  I really enjoyed the worldbuilding in her Binti series, so I was looking forward to more of the same.

Noor follows Anwuli Okwudili (or AO as she prefers to be called), a young woman who was born wrong (and later in a freak accident which made everything worse).  Against the wishes of her family and the larger society, she's had many cybernetic upgrades, which allowed her to walk.  But the larger society of Nigeria looks at her as a freak and devil as a result.  So one day when she goes to a market, one which she always thought was quite safe, where the people knew her, a group of men attacked her.  She fights back, and kills them.  Fleeing for her life, she makes her way north towards the desert and the Red Eye, a disastrous sandstorm that has cropped up on Earth that is similar to Jupiter's Great Red Spot.  Taking herself offline, she fully intends to just go and die.  But she encounters a Fulani herdsman named DNA and his two remaining cows (GPS and Carpe Diem) who have also just escaped from their own tragedy.  And so they end up on the run together.

While the book is short (I think it's only 211 pages), I felt like it trudged forward, even during what should have been the faster paced action scenes. Which was odd, because then suddenly the book just seemed to end abruptly.  I will admit though, I did really enjoy the end, despite it feeling so hasty.

I also felt like it didn't spend enough time with the characters of the book.  I had a pretty good feel for AO, but I felt like I was being told about her, rather than being allowed to connect with her on an emotional level. That was true of the other characters too (although as you moved away from AO, I felt like you had less and less of a feel for anyone, including DNA).  

All in all, I found Noor to have some interesting ideas, particularly about identity and fitting in, but it just never came together as a whole for me. :(

Binti: The Night Masquerade

Well the library doesn't have the last book in the Binti trilogy, so I bought it on my Kindle and read it right away after finishing Binti: Home.  Unlike the time lag between the first two books, Binti: The Night Masquerade takes place pretty much right where Binti: Home leaves off.

Binti and Mwinyi return to her home to find the building burnt to the ground (and several nearby homes damaged as well).  She discovers Okwu has hidden in the lake and has called reinforcements.  So she calls on the elders to meet with her and asks them to invoke Himba deep culture over the Khoush and Meduse to make peace once and for all.  The elders agree.  But at the time of the appointed meeting, the elders do not appear.  So Binti is left to invoke the deep culture on her own.  Amazingly, thanks to her Meduse DNA and the alien technology she has recently awakened, she is able to invoke deep culture on her own.  The Meduse chief and Khoush king agree to peace.  But one of the Khoush king's underlings fires on the Meduse, restarting the war anyway.  Binti is hit in the crossfire and dies.

The war heads to space, leaving the Himba behind.  Mwinyi discovers that Binti's family is safe - they were sheltered in the living root of an Undying Tree (a root that was part of their home's foundation).  Mwinyi and Okwu ask if they can take Binti's body to Saturn because that's where she was going to next thanks to a recurring dream she kept having with her mysterious alien artifact good luck charm.  The Himba have a funeral for Binti, then a newly born spaceship fish (the spaceships in this world are animals - this fish is the daughter of the fish Binti has been travelling in up to this point of the story) arrives to take Mwinyi, Okwu, and Binti's body to Saturn.  But when they arrive at Saturn, Binti is miraculously brought back to life.  It seems that the microbes in New Fish were able to do it *somehow* because New Fish was just born.

So they all travel back to Oomza Uni where Binti gets to learn about her crazy genetic makeup (and that she can only go 5 miles on land away from New Fish; New Fish can go 7 miles up).  The end.

I found myself disappointed by the ending of this series, even though I kind of had a feeling that Binti was somehow going to come back to life (her death was around the halfway point of the third book).  Binti's death was written very well.  And while she may not have succeeded in ending the war, she brought together two human tribes who looked like they were going to work together in the future.  When she was brought back to life, it just felt like the narrative was cheapened (especially since it really did feel like "space magic brought her back to life." Oh, and she refused to talk to her family right away to let them know she was still alive - that seemed selfish in the way that her siblings accused her of being all through Binti: Home). 

On the plus side, this book felt much more complete than the previous two (the previous two both felt to me like they should have been expanded into full novels).  But that's probably because this book was largely just the resolution of things that had happened in the previous book. 

All in all, the Binti series is an interesting read.  If you love worldbuilding, you will enjoy a lot of aspects of this book because that is very much its strength.  But if you're looking for a deeper narrative (and a more fleshed out book), you should probably give these books a pass.

Binti: Home

I wasn't completely sure if I wanted to keep reading more of Nnedi Okorafor's Binti series, but the library had book two so why not?  They're novellas, which means they're super fast reads.

Binti: Home takes place about a year after the first book.  Binti and Okwu have settled into life at Oomza Uni.  But Binti has been struggling with post-traumatic stress from her ordeal in the first book.  She's also found herself increasingly prone to bouts of rage.  Fearing that she has become unclean, she decides to return home and go on a pilgrimage.  Okwu decides to accompany her - he will be the first Meduse to step foot on Earth in peace.

Their arrival is difficult.  Binti's family welcomes her home, but the place turns into chaos when Okwu arrives and the Khoush attack him.  Binti manages to stop anyone from dying.  But later at her home, she has an argument with her sister which almost turns violent (Binti spits in her sister's face in anger, something she would never have done before).  Retreating to her room, she sees the Night Masquerade.  I wasn't really sure what the Night Masquerade really was, but it is something that only men and boys see, not women.  Right after that, Binti's paternal grandmother, one of the Desert People, arrives to take Binti to meet their high priestess.  Binti discovers that she has alien technology in her DNA and is given the choice to awaken it. After she makes the choice, she learns that her home has been attacked and Okwu may have been killed.  The book ends with her heading home to see what has happened.

Like the first volume, Binti: Home has some fantastic worldbuilding.  I do still wish these had been lengthened into full novels though; I feel like there was so much more that could have been explored.  I also wish Okwu had been in this volume a little bit more than he was. 

Binti

I have a pile of nonfiction I want to read.  But it's the long weekend so I decided to take a break and read the novella Binti instead. Binti, written by Nnedi Okorafor, is a Hugo and Nebula award winner.  I've seen it go by at work a few times and was intrigued (although I will freely admit I didn't actually read the synopsis on the back of the book). 

Binti is the first of her people, the Himba, to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution in the galaxy.  But in going she is going against her family and her people's traditions; the Himba are of the land and do not leave it.  Stealing away in the dead of night, she leaves her homeland for the first time ever.  And even before she steps foot in space, she finds herself an alien among the majority Khoush in the spaceport.  But she makes her way relatively free of incident onto her transport, where she meets some of her fellow students.

Now I was enjoying this story as a fish out of water story. I liked Okorafor's world building.  The Himba people were very interesting and I was hoping to learn more about the Khoush as Binti interacted with them on the shuttle.  Unfortunately that was kind of glossed over because pretty much everyone on the shuttle except Binti gets murdered when an alien race, the Meduse, arrive. 

The story actually did lose me a bit around this point. 

The Meduse try to murder Binti too, but she is magically able to protect herself with an ancient artifact she happened to have with her as her good luck charm.  The artifact hurts the Meduse.  But it also allows her to communicate with them.  She discovers that the Meduse are heading to Oomza University to retrieve their chief's stinger, which was stolen from him and somehow ended up in the school.  Binti convinces them to arrive peacefully and let her act as an interpreter for them to get the stinger back.  She does so, and as a gesture of goodwill, the school asks that the Meduse send her new friend, Okwu, to the school as well.

I wasn't quite sure what to make of all this.  I'm glad that it all worked out, but the fact that the Meduse murdered a whole bunch of students didn't seem to matter at all to the university's deliberations and final decision on the whole thing.  I guess the ending just seemed a little too abrupt for my liking; Binti really seemed like it should have been a novel, rather than a novella.

All in all, the world building is fantastic and I would love to know more about all the cultures in this book (the Himba, Khoush, and the Meduse).  But the story itself could have been expanded a fair bit (and in my opinion, would have been the stronger for it).