Death of the Author

'Death of the Author' is an emotionally intense and multilayered story featuring a paraplegic Nigerian-American author who wants to experience everything the universe has to offer and a pair of robot personalities unwittingly fused together by the last human on Earth.

Or it's a story about an author who finally frees herself to write a groundbreaking piece of science fiction while she takes the reader through Nigeria and Chicago — the good and bad and ugly of both locations — while also sharing her ties with her protective family with the reader.

Or it's a story about two robot tribes hellbent on destroying each other as nuclear Armageddon races to Earth from the Sun.

Or... it's not just one but at least two really good stories interwoven within each other, each teasing and dancing and pulling the reader on a journey of family, healing, struggle, loss, control and power.

This was a really interesting book, and I think it's one where I kinda blame the blurb for messing up my reading of it. The basic premise is that a Nigerian-American woman, down on her luck, writes a book about robots in a post human future that ends up becoming a huge international success (not a spoiler, literally part of the blurb). But then the blurb says "something strange begins to happen", which made me expect something supernatural or magical realism-ish to happen, and I kept expecting, and kept expecting, but it didn't come. Because that's not really the type of book this is. It's really just a book about this woman's experience of life and family, and navigating the world with a disability. It is a beautiful book. I love it, and I think I want to try listening to it again sometime later with this mentality. I won't spoil why the blurb thought those words were appropriate, it's truly best to put the book in your queue, forget why you put it there, and read it without the blurb. Buy the book and scribble over the blurb with sharpy.