Hugos 2023: Akata Woman by Nnedi Okorafor

Akata Woman by Nnedi Okorafor

Originally published: 2022
Read: July 2023

Akata Woman is the third book in Nnedi Okorafor's "Nsibidi Scripts" YA fantasy series, and the second to be a finalist for the Hugo-adjacent Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book (in fact, the second book won the first award). I thought the first book was just okay, but found the second much more enjoyable.

Unfortunately, I thought this was back to the level of the first one. The cast of characters, protagonist Sunny aside, seemed largely interchangeable to me, and the plot never really took off. Basically, Sunny and her friends go to a place, it gets described, then they go to a different place, repeat until suddenly the book comes to an end. An okay travelogue, but it did little for me.

Hugos 2018: Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor

Hardcover, 477 pages
Published 2017
Borrowed from my wife
Read June 2018

Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor

I found Akata Warrior more enjoyable and better put together than Akata Witch. Whereas Akata Witch felt like a series of incidents loosely strung together with a climax tacked on, Akata Warrior had drive and focus: incidents led to each other in a pretty clear and straightforward way. Sunny needs to help her brother, which leads to a punishment, which leads to a vision, and so on. I also think her character had a more clear throughline as well, in terms of (much like in the Binti books) finding her place in a society she doesn't quite fit into thanks to both time spent away from it and physical uniqueness and special abilities.

There's a lot of nice moments and good character touches here. I liked the expanded focus on Sunny's relationships with her family (who felt very one-dimensional in Akata Witch), especially her brother, who runs afoul of confraternity at university and ends up being partially initiated into the world of the magical Leopard People as a result. I also enjoyed the flying giant rat, the strange language of the book Sunny attempts to read, the tangled relationships among the kids, and more. After the first book, I was skeptical about the second, but I would definitely read a third.

Hugos 2018 [Prelude]: Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

Yet another Bernice Summerfield review from me: worms eating books in Matthew Sweet's The Diet of Worms.

Trade paperback, 349 pages
Published 2017 (originally 2011)
Borrowed from my wife
Read June 2018

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

This is sort of a classic "young wizard" story, where a kid discovers they're magic and gets trained. In fact, it reminded me of nothing so much as the first Young Wizards book by Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard, as I think it basically follows the same template, though I'm sure there are older antecedents. (Indeed, The Dark Is Rising springs to mind.)

It's an okay example of the genre. There are a lot of individual moments that are nice, but the book as a whole feels pretty aimless. The protagonist, Sunny, has an apocalyptic vision early on, but it pretty much has nothing to with anything. (Which makes it pretty baffling that the book's UK edition was titled What Sunny Saw in the Flames.) Halfway through, the kids are told they have to hunt down a serial killer, but they don't actually do this until about forty pages before the book ends, which means the whole thing goes easily and predictably even if they are in mortal peril. (I feel bad constantly comparing Akata Witch to Young Wizards, but compare to the harrowing confrontation with the Lone Power at the climax of So You Want to Be a Wizard.)

I did enjoy the worldbuilding a lot (I like the idea of money you get when you have a genuine educational experience), and I suspect if I were closer to the target age, I'd've got more out of it, but as an adult reader, I've read more satisfying and interesting pieces of YA fiction.