Who Fears Death [Paperback]

Set in an alternate/post-apocalyptic/futuristic African desert (with magic) "Who Fears Death" opens with a teenage Onyesonwu at her father's funeral. Grieving, she briefly and unintentionally starts to bring him back to life. She is a sorcerer, feared and hated because of her powers and her parentage. Her abilities, though spectacular, mostly endanger her and cause her suffering. But they also lead her on a quest to save her mother's people from impending war, slavery, and eventual genocide.

The story is non-linear and framed as a more mature Onyesonwu's last words. Though complex and exotic, the way it's told makes everything clear and easy to follow, with background introduced just when we need to know it.

In its skeleton, the novel is not so different from a classic quest fantasy. There's a magical apprenticeship, prophecies, a quest to fight evil, and travels with a band of companions, but the details make the experience very, very different.

Note that "Who Fears Death" deals frankly with some horrific subjects. Be prepared to face the reality of topics like rape, war, genocide, and female circumcision. It's never gory, gratuitous, or -- amazingly -- particularly depressing (!!), but nothing is glossed over.

The characters were all distinct, real, and interesting. The plot is engaging and logical. While there are real-world political and social issues addressed, the story -- Onyesonwu's story -- is what matters. Best of all (sorry, I'm shallow) there are numerous elements which are just extremely *cool*. Vivid, beautiful, fun, terrifying, and numinous, in turn.

Overall, highly recommended.

Nnedi Okorafor unites the best of Achebe's Things Fall Apart with The Odyssey and The Lord of the Rings in a post-apocalyptic fantasy that sadly just thuds. Her story begins pregnant with possibility and rich with the kind of language and imagery that has long drawn me to post-colonial African literature, and I knew I'd love it. But then it bogs down in extraneous content and never achieves real traction.

Conceived in violence and born in war, Onyesonwu has fought for everything all her life. But she becomes apprenticed to a great wizard and finally finds her place in society. That is, until one rash choice draws the attention of the brutal biological father she has never met. Suddenly Onyesonwu must leave the only life she's ever known to confront her father before his dark wizardry consumes her people.

The first third of this novel really sings. Growing up an outcast in a world that denies its violent heritage, Onyesonwu must uncover her destiny as a stranger. Her evocative descriptions create a lively society built on the mysterious foundations of a dead world. Living on the outside, Onyesonwu sees truths her peers reject, and she describes them in such incisive detail that I believe I could travel to this place.

But then the story shifts to a conventional quest fantasy as Onyesonwu and her friends seek her father. And the quest drags in an episodic fashion. The team has encounters, sometimes proves its mettle, but most often talks interminably. They have soap-operatic personal encounters, and unbelievably long passages occur in which nothing happens to advance the plot. I soldiered on, hoping the story would redeem itself at the end.

No such luck. Important events flash past, and if your mind wanders at key moments, too bad. One principal character dies so suddenly, with so little fanfare, that our narrator has to remind us the death has happened. Even the confrontation with the ultimate evil happens very fleetingly, just one more episode in a string like beads. This book starts so well, and then I found myself praying for the end.

After three acclaimed YA novels in a similar African dreamscape, this is Okorafor's first novel featuring an adult heroine. Perhaps Okorafor is maturing as a writer herself. If so, well done, but she has far to go. Her menacing evil should be less abstract, her quest should be more tightly constructed, and she must hold her characters' feet to the fire. This book never quite fulfills its exquisite promise.

I'd heard good things about this book. But between its poor structure, its infuriating outdated tropes, its overpowered heroine and its all-too-easy magical solutions to real-life problems, I'm left wondering why so many people like it.

Who Fears Death is a post-apocalyptic fantasy novel, set in a future Sudan with many of the problems that plague the region today (genocide, weaponized rape, female genital mutilation, etc.). The narrator, Onyesonwu, is a child of rape, who faces discrimination based on her gender and her mixed-race status while growing up, but goes on in the second half of the novel to undertake a quest to stop the genocide against her mother's people.

So far, so good. I liked the vividly described setting and culture, the heroine's interactions with her friends, the simple, direct prose and the way the book deals with sexism. I didn't like the long passages dealing with the spirit world or explaining how magic works (your mileage may vary; I find that kind of stuff boring). The real problems, however, became more evident the further I got into the book. Some SPOILERS follow.

1) As this book becomes a save-the-world quest novel, the subplots quickly overwhelm the main plot. A large chunk of the second half of the book is spent on intra-group tensions (who's sleeping with whom, etc.) and wacky wayside tribes; only a few pages are spent actually saving the world at the end. It's nice that Okorafor doesn't romanticize the questors, but if you're going to write a book about stopping a genocide, your characters need to spend more than a few pages actually doing that.

2) The book is cluttered with some of the most tired of outdated fantasy tropes: the Chosen One prophesied to save the world, the standard coming-of-age story with a mentor and a quest, the prophecy-driven plot in which characters make decisions based on the prophecy they've heard rather than reason or common sense, etc. Without the African setting, I don't believe anyone would have taken this nonsense seriously.

3) Speaking of unfortunate clichés, one of the nastiest tropes to plague young-adult fantasy rears its ugly head here: the heroine, claiming she doesn't believe in killing, refuses to finish the villain when she has him at her mercy (despite the fact that he's initiated a genocide and has every intention of carrying through with it, and has raped and killed countless women).... but she feels no remorse when she kills and/or maims large numbers of random, nameless and relatively blameless characters without speaking parts. Google "What Measure is a Mook" if you haven't encountered this one before. Inexcusable.

4) The heroine is way too powerful. She can do apparently anything: alter time, bring back the dead, etc. Of course, to avoid leeching the heroic sacrifices of their value, the author comes up with increasingly contrived excuses for her inability to revive important characters.

5) Last and worst of all: while the author raises plenty of important and timely issues, such as genocide and FGM, she deals with them poorly, having the heroine solve them by magic. The solution to genocide, apparently, is to have the heroine "rewrite" their holy book--which doesn't require any actual writing or thought, but rather the equivalent of waving a wand at it. What's the idea here? That violent and/or racist holy books are the sole cause of genocide? That the only solution to this very real problem is intrepid time-travelers (who don't really even need a plan, just friendship and courage)? It doesn't work. I respect that the author is taking on real-world issues and that she's trying to make a point about how the stories we tell affect the actions we take. But she simplifies it to the point of caricature; the most cursory knowledge of real-world history reveals that the same religions, with the same texts, are in some times and places violent and intolerant, in others accepting and peaceful. In the end, although there's personal sacrifice, the solution here is all too easy and simplistic.

So while I was initially excited to read some non-European, feminist fantasy, I really can't recommend this book. As a YA novel it might be acceptable (although the amount of teen sex, rape and other violence might raise a few eyebrows), but it doesn't work for adults. Its overall positive reception seems to me to speak more to the dearth of African fantasy available in the English-speaking world than anything else.