Who Fears Death

I looked it up, "Who Fears Death" isn't a debut novel, but it feels like a debut novel in the best possible way. It's emotionally raw, and slightly unfinished in the sense that you can feel the author poured all her ideas and feelings and all the themes she wanted to explore into this book to the point she couldn't possibly get to all of them. The result is something that's brimming with creativity and life. While the book reads mostly like something targeted at a YA audience, it's frank and direct in its discussion of sex and female sexuality in a way that you wouldn't expect to see outside of adult literature, but it lends a lot of power to the story overall. This is something that matters to the author, and you can tell.

The setting in which magic exists next to the left-over technology from an implied pre-apocalyptic society is very well-developed. Especially the magic system is well-thought-out to the point that I wonder if it's based on a real belief system. It reminds me a bit of the books on witchcraft in Africa I read back when I studied anthropology.

For me, the only real flaw of this book - and this feels like a downside of the same creative force that makes it so enjoyable - is that the second half of the book takes on a bit of road trip plot with way too many stops. While they're all interesting individually, they are too loosely connected and the story loses much of its momentum in this section. It makes me wish that Nnedi Okorafor had had a very stern editor who could've put their foot down and forced her to kill her darlings.

I've seen that she's still a very productive author, and purely based on the covers and descriptions her new books seem to be a bit more mainstream YA fantasy fare. I'd like to pick those up to see what I think as well, but I'm a bit apprehensive. I'd be surprised if they contain the same raw, frank emotional force as Who Fears Death, as that is, admittedly, not its most sellable quality. But I can't imagine Okorafor's work not suffering from sanding down those rough edges.

I can't decide if this was a 3 or 4 star book for me. There are things I really liked about it, but also things I didn't.

Really liked:
- interesting post-apocalyptic Africa setting, which is never really explained. But there are ipods and stashes of old computers in caves and advanced technology, BUT, also magic is a thing and there's a legend about how the goddess struck down and cursed humans for their hubris in creating all the technology. I'd definitely be interested in reading more about what happened to create this world (and I see there's a prequel novel that may cover some of this).
- super strong female characters who persist despite incredible hardship
- very unusual and interesting world and magic systems

Things I didn't like:
- there's a lot of very graphic violence against women as essential plot points - the protagonist is born as a result of an extremely violent rape, there's an ongoing genocide against the protagonist's people (the Okeke) which involves regular ritual rape of the captured women to create mixed race "Ewu" children, there's female genital mutilation rituals the play a key role in establishing the protagonist's social circle, and it's literally written in the holy book that the Okeke race are destined to be slaves of the Nuru. So yeah, a lot of unpleasant and very hard to read things, which can sometimes be necessary as plot points but that doesn't mean I enjoy reading them, and I'm not really convinced they were all necessary.
- the overall plot was a bit cliche'd - young child coming-of-age discovering herself in possession of inexplicably powerful yet untrained magical powers and heading off to save the world according to prophecy - I mean, how many times has that been done already? It was a different setting than usual, but the same old elements were all there.
- several of the characters really weren't that likeable, to be quite honest. The dynamics between the protagonist Onyesonwu and her boyfriend and friends often seemed strained or even nonsensical. She seems to be "destined" be with him just because they're both half-breeds, despite the fact most of the time he's kind of a jerk to her and is constantly hiding information. Her other friends are often selfish and unsupportive and squabble between each other a lot, which is just annoying. And her mother, although initially portrayed as loving, also seems to have basically manipulated her daughter's existence and purpose for her entire life to achieve her own goals of revenge. So yeah, while the characters also had some likeable points, I didn't really embrace them entirely either, and that always makes me struggle a bit to really love a book.

Overall I enjoyed it, and will likely pick up the prequel also, but I don't think I'd recommend it without a few warnings, and it definitely would be a difficult read for teenage readers despite the fact the protagonist is a teen herself.

In a post-apocalyptic future in sub-Saharan Africa, the Nuru are waging war against the Okeke. The Nurus believe in using rape as a weapon. They know that raped Okeke women will be shunned by their families and that any children born will be Ewu. Ewu children are identifiable by their skin color. It is believed that children conceived in violence will be violent themselves so Ewu are kept outside civilized society.

After a powerful Nuru sorcerer rapes an Okeke woman, she flees to the desert where she gives birth to a girl who she names Onyesonwu. It means Who Fears Death. Onyesonwu grows to be a powerful sorcerer herself but will her society reject the possibility of a savior who is twice an outcast – both Ewu and a woman?

I first heard about this book on a Book Riot list of fantasy books that weren’t set in a pseudo-European setting. It is a powerful story that stayed with me because of the way it handles systemic misogyny. From the opening scenes of women being attacked deliberately as a strategy to destabilize a population to the way all women in the book were kept in their very circumscribed place, the book shows example after example of why the rights of women are so important. I was reading this book during the time that the #womenagainstfeminism discussion was happening on Twitter. I just wanted to put this book in the hands of people who think that feminism is irrelevant now to show why women need rights. The bleakness of a society that tells girls that genital mutilation is a special rite that will bring honor to their families when they don’t even know what is being done to them stayed with me long after the book was finished. It was for driving the lesson home yet again that I gave this a 5 star rating. I only give that to books that stay with me deeply and that I want to put in people’s hands tell them that they have to read it.

Other reviewers have complained that even though this is an adult book because of the themes, it is structured like a YA novel. The protagonists are around 20 at the time of the main action. There is a journey with friends to save the day. There is a love triangle with some of the characters. That didn’t bother me.

I wish there had been more world building. You don’t know what happened to change the world from the world we live in. It is never discussed. The story could seem to be taking place in the past most of the time but then a high tech thing is mentioned in passing. It is a little jarring.

I enjoyed some characters that I hadn’t seen before in fantasy books. I particularly liked the tribe that lives inside the eye of a sandstorm that their sorcerer controls. I want a whole book about them.

Don’t let the darkness of the subject scare you off. (When I tried to get this from the library I couldn’t find it. I had to ask and then that person had to ask. There was a whispered conversation between librarians. “She wants a book called Who Fears Death?” They both tried to look at me out of the corner of their eyes to see what kind of a freak I was. The fact that the card catalog page labeled it “Genocide – fiction” probably didn’t help.) If you like fantasy or magical realism, you will enjoy this book.