Audiobook
I like this one. There's a lot of pain in this story, and also lightness. It got a little too fairytale-ish for my taste at one point, but oooh, the ending. Mhm. The audiobook is very well read too.
Before I read this story, I had read the star-spanning Afrofuturist novella Binti by the same author. The setting for this one is quite different, in a near future Ghana where Western culture penetrates the social fabric to a limited degree. I would call this novella as part of the fantasy realm than science fiction, although there are some interesting insights into the development and adoption of technology in Africa.
This is a story of a young girl coming to know herself without the help of her family She experiences scenes of death and harsh treatment so this might not be suitable for some young readers. She has an encounter with a mysterious starfall which manifests as an unusual seed conferring her with frightening powers to strike people and animals dead, even at a distance. Over the course of the novella she has a complicated relationship with the space seed, …
Before I read this story, I had read the star-spanning Afrofuturist novella Binti by the same author. The setting for this one is quite different, in a near future Ghana where Western culture penetrates the social fabric to a limited degree. I would call this novella as part of the fantasy realm than science fiction, although there are some interesting insights into the development and adoption of technology in Africa.
This is a story of a young girl coming to know herself without the help of her family She experiences scenes of death and harsh treatment so this might not be suitable for some young readers. She has an encounter with a mysterious starfall which manifests as an unusual seed conferring her with frightening powers to strike people and animals dead, even at a distance. Over the course of the novella she has a complicated relationship with the space seed, cast into despair when it is sold away, angry at it for the evil it causes through her, using her magical attunement to chase after its wanderings across the country. It didn't feel as though the whole story behind the star seed was really resolved in the end, or completely explained either.
The audio narration was helpful in suggesting when the characters were speaking English versus Twi or other Ghanaian languages among themselves simply by adjusting the depth of the accent, adding to my enjoyment of the experience.
