Zach's Reviews > Who Fears Death

I've kept an eye on Nnedi Okorafor's career for a while now. Her books always intrigued me-I have a hard time resisting anything post-apocalyptic,* and hers are set in Africa, a great antidote to the typical lily-white American version-but the fact that they were always targeted at young adults kept me away. I like books to have some subtlety about them, paragraphs that don't have the same words in each sentence, lines of dialogue that don't end with "she said ___ly." (To be fair these are certainly also faults of the pulpy SF of earlier decades, but I have a higher standard for newer work, I guess)

So when hype about Who Fears Death, her first "adult" novel, started bubbling up, I couldn't wait.

Oops.

Turns out that what separates this novel from her more kid-friendly ones is the content, not the construction. Certainly the themes and events of the story are undeniably, brutally adult, and Okorafor certainly deserves a great deal of respect for her willingness to unflinchingly examine rape, genocide, and female genital mutilation.** This is an author committed to the use of science fiction as a dialectical examination of our own present, and this left some scenes of the book excruciatingly difficult to read. The prose, however, is still rather plodding and simplistic, while the dialogue.... oof. It was hard not to laugh through most of the arguments the couples in the book had (of which there were so, so many).

Other than that, though, I was pretty disappointed. Outside of the on-point politics, this was a pretty standard coming-of-age/quest novel. I have absolutely no patience left for the magical bildungsroman anymore (which also left me deeply disappointed in that Pat Rothfuss book). Other people have held this up as a sterling example of subversion of genre tropes, but I just didn't get that from the text at all. The nuances might be different, but this is still, at heart, a young person gaining a teacher, learning they are the subject of a prophecy, and going to defeat an evil lord. Where I thought this was going to go, however - the heroine realizing that rather than only defeating her opponent, she needed to upend the systemic problems that produced him - ended up being only partially the case, and rendered the ending rather cheap and disappointing. This was such a shock, actually, that it probably means I misread a lot of the book and should go through it again... only I didn't enjoy the book enough to invest that extra time in it, I suppose.


So, basically, a book whose ideas and arguments I fully respect, but at the same time a novel I didn't really enjoy much.


* There was actually very little in the way of post-apocalyptic imagery or themes in this novel, sadly. Again, though, that was a problem with my own expectations, not Okorafor's work.
** Apparently people have attacked her for glorifying female circumcision, which is... insane. Other people have attacked her for criticizing the practice, which is wrong-headed in the opposite direction (although more in-line with what she actually does in the book, I guess.) Either way, I feel like I need to emphasize again how painful and important her discussion of female oppression is.