Noor by Nnedi Okorafor: review

5/5 stars on Goodreads

Noor by Nnedi Okorafor

Noor means light, and in Nnedi Okorafor’s africanfuturist novel, Noor, it is the name of huge wind turbines that fill the deserts of Africa, generating enough power that electricity can be exported to Europe.

The book is set in near-future Nigeria, which has grown wealthy thanks to the huge energy business. It and pretty much everything else in life is in the hands of Ultimate Corporation, which provides for the poor too. The society is similar to ours, except even more connected by electronic devices and under constant surveillance by drones, the feed of which can be followed by anyone. To be off the grid requires special measures.

AO—Artificial Organism, like she prefers to be called—is a beneficiary of the corporation’s charity. Born without legs and one arm, she’s welcomed the artificial limbs and other improvements they’ve offered, even implants to her brain to stop weird hallucinations. But the society sees her as a demon, and her life is constant balancing between being useful and not drawing attention to herself.

She thinks she’s found a safe haven for herself in a small town, with most of her digital footprint erased. Then one day at the marketplace, a group of men attack her. Something snaps in her brain, literally, and she kills the men. Now she has to flee to the desert.

There she meets DNA, a traditional Fulani herdsman who’s also fleeing. His traditional way of life of grazing his cattle freely has angered the farmers who have attacked his people, killing everyone except him. He’s also had to kill to save his life, but like with AO, the news feed only shows the part where he is the aggressor.

Together they flee to the only place where they can’t be found, inside Red Eye, a huge sand tornado in the middle of the desert which hides many fugitives. There they uncover the truth about AO’s implants and the attacks against the herdsmen, and learn, that to save themselves, they have to go against the one thing that controls everything, the Ultimate Corporation.

The book was told in AO’s point of view, and it suited the narrative well. She was an interesting character, an outsider who both wanted to belong and had embraced her differences. Her growing abilities with technology weren’t entirely well explained—was it magical, or intentional by the maker of the implants?—but she embraced her role as a saviour/destroyer with all the anger she’d bottled. There was romance too, more on the background, but raising the stakes for both her and DNA.

This was a deceptively small novel that grew to have a global impact. From start to finish, it was impossible to see where it would lead, and if a happy ending was even possible. Stakes kept getting higher, with both technology and the desert against AO and DNA. The author knows the traditional Nigerian ways well, and everything felt authentic. All in all, an interesting read that will linger with me for a long time.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Savior by J.R. Ward: review

4/5 stars on Goodreads

The Savior by J.R. Ward

The Savior is the seventeenth book in J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood urban fantasy series, and a solid addition. What makes her books great is how she returns to old characters and continues their stories, in good and bad. This time it was John Matthew’s turn, and his arc was the best in the book, emotional and heart-breaking, as he ponders his likely death and his life. The conclusion of that story-line was especially satisfying.

The love story was between Murhder, a disgraced member of the brotherhood, and Sarah, a human scientist. It wasn’t the main focus of the book though, and they didn’t even meet until later in the story. They both had personal issues to deal with—him with his madness, her with the death of her fiancé and the revelations that brought—and those carried the book nicely. The love story was more of an insta-love type and not terribly interesting, but nice. A great addition to their story was Nate, a young vampire who has been used as a Guinea pig in human experiments, that the two of them rescue.

As is usual, there was also an ongoing story that focuses on the bad guy; this time about Throe who wants to usurp the crown. Luckily it didn’t dominate the book, as he’s not a very interesting foe. The climax of his story seems to tie with Ward’s other series about fallen angels, if I read it correctly, so there’s that to look forward to.

Unlike usually, there wasn’t a new character introduced that will become the focus of the subsequent books. I hope that doesn’t mean the series is coming to its end. There’s still Lassiter, who got his great moment in this book, and who could use his own book. I hope we’ll get that one eventually too, especially if the characters from the parallel series will show up in this one.

All in all, this was a good solid book that I gobbled down in two marathon reading sessions that lasted till small hours of the night. It wasn’t the best book in the series by any definition, but it was better than the two previous books, and it got me to take out the tissues, so I’m happy with it.

***

The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal

I’ve read a couple of other books too that I’ve neglected to write a review of. First one is The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal, the follow up to her great The Calculating Stars novel, an alternative history where the humankind is racing to Mars to escape the dying earth. In this book, Elma is on a three year mission to Mars in the early 1960s, with a cast of characters familiar from the first book.

This was in many ways a better book than the first. The story was more interesting, Elma wasn’t an onlooker in her own life, and the plot was more compact. But Elma was still a bit of a scapegoat to everything that is wrong in her society, which was annoying, and the story’s focus was more on those larger issues than the mission itself. And again, the most interesting story arch was given to Stetson Parker who really grew in this book and turned out to be a great character. He reads like an enemy-turned-love-interest, and he probably would’ve been that if Kowal hadn’t fixed Elma’s marriage with the novella that started the series, where Elma and her husband are old people in Mars. A wasted opportunity there, in my opinion. But despite the flaws, the book stayed with me for a long time, so much so that I had trouble finding anything interesting to read that would match it.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

This was partially remedied by Binti, a novella by Nnedi Okorafor. It’s a sci-fi story of an African girl, Binti, who is accepted to a prestigious university on a different planet. She’s the first in her family to leave earth—or her home village even—and she does it in secret, fearing her family’s reaction. On her way there, the ship is attacked by a tentacled alien race and she’s the only survivor, thanks to a device that allows her to understand them. It’s a story of prejudice, hate and acceptance, with a highly imaginative world and an interesting main character. The ending is a bit long, but it brings the story to a satisfying conclusion. I’ll likely read the follow-up stories too.