Nnedi Okorafor: Who fears death (AudiobookFormat, 2010, Brilliance Audio)
[sound recording] :, 920 pages
English language
Published 2010 by Brilliance Audio.
In a far future, post-nuclear-holocaust Africa, genocide plagues one region. The aggressors, the Nuru, have decided to follow the Great Book and exterminate the Okeke. But when the only surviving member of a slain Okeke village is brutally raped, she manages to escape, wandering farther into the desert. She gives birth to a baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand and instinctively knows that her daughter is different.
Quite a trek through dystopian future Africa. But an overzealous copy editor corrected “Palm Wine Drinkard” to “Drunkard” — I think — so I gotta ding it a star
Loved this! It got more and more like The Palm Wine Drunkard writing as it went on and transformed into a book that was like those psychedelic adventures.
I finished this some time ago, but I still can't really do it justice in a review. Some of the themes and world-building (and even one of the characters!) is shared with the later novel Noor, but this novel is somehow more elemental. For me the two most powerful themes were the codification of hatred as religion and how sex and reproductive biology inform politics (in the small).
Content warnings: pervasive misogyny, sexual violence, and racism play important roles in the plot.
I finished this some time ago, but I still can't really do it justice in a review. Some of the themes and world-building (and even one of the characters!) is shared with the later novel Noor, but this novel is somehow more elemental. For me the two most powerful themes were the codification of hatred as religion and how sex and reproductive biology inform politics (in the small).
Content warnings: pervasive misogyny, sexual violence, and racism play important roles in the plot.
This book is what we could call in German, strong tobacco. The book already starts with very difficult topics and wishes to be treated with the accompanying respect.
While the book and me did not really become friends in the first half, the second one gripped and convinced me.
