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Second time I'm reading this book. First time was, god, more than a decade ago, and I'm noticing it goes down much easier now. It was a bit difficult to get into back then. I don't know why, but it feels like such a nice, cozy November read for me right now. It's not a cozy story, but I picture the whole story as taking place in a vaguely steampunkish world, set against the constant black of space.

I looked it up, "Who Fears Death" isn't a debut novel, but it feels like a debut novel in the best possible way. It's emotionally raw, and slightly unfinished in the sense that you can feel the author poured all her ideas and feelings and all the themes she wanted to explore into this book to the point she couldn't possibly get to all of them. The result is something that's brimming with creativity and life. While the book reads mostly like something targeted at a YA audience, it's frank and direct in its discussion of sex and female sexuality in a way that you wouldn't expect to see outside of adult literature, but it lends a lot of power to the story overall. This is something that matters to the author, and you can tell.

The setting in which magic exists next to the left-over technology from an implied pre-apocalyptic society is very well-developed. Especially the magic system is well-thought-out to the point that I wonder if it's based on a real belief system. It reminds me a bit of the books on witchcraft in Africa I read back when I studied anthropology.

For me, the only real flaw of this book - and this feels like a downside of the same creative force that makes it so enjoyable - is that the second half of the book takes on a bit of road trip plot with way too many stops. While they're all interesting individually, they are too loosely connected and the story loses much of its momentum in this section. It makes me wish that Nnedi Okorafor had had a very stern editor who could've put their foot down and forced her to kill her darlings.

I've seen that she's still a very productive author, and purely based on the covers and descriptions her new books seem to be a bit more mainstream YA fantasy fare. I'd like to pick those up to see what I think as well, but I'm a bit apprehensive. I'd be surprised if they contain the same raw, frank emotional force as Who Fears Death, as that is, admittedly, not its most sellable quality. But I can't imagine Okorafor's work not suffering from sanding down those rough edges.

@SallyStrange@bookwyrm.social Oh fun! I'm in the middle of that one.

@SallyStrange@bookwyrm.social Oh fun! I'm also in the middle of that one :)

After Sunshine, I'm returning to the McKinley writing I enjoy - her fairy tale re-tellings.

While I missed the darkness of Deerskin, it's a perfectly well done version of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale. There's a bit of coming of age, there's a bit of romance. I liked that all three sisters had a really good relationship. It was enjoyable and there isn't much more to say about it. That may be because of the source material, of course. Beauty and Beast was written by Barbot de Villeneuve to educate young French noblewomen on virtue (as far as I know), while Deerskin comes from the oral tradition of German mothers telling terrifying tales so their children would stay out of the woods. And even within that category it is one of the Grimms' more horrifying fairytales. Disney isn't going to adapt that one, you can be sure. (I wonder if Beauty being a bookish girl, and the giant library inspired the Disney version, or if this was already a thing in the original story. I can't quite remember.)

McKinley also wrote another book based on this fairytale - Rose Daughter - which I'm learning from reviews is a little bit more complex. I loved reading Angela Carter's different versions of this tale in her story collection, and comparing them, so I'm super curious about that.

Almost finished this book. I'm honestly really disappointed it doesn't included the same past-lives sections as the former three, that was kind of their whole selling point and what I enjoyed most. From googling a bit, I also gather it's not going to come back in the sequels...

Man, I'm really hankering for a big fantasy doorstopper that is not too grimdark (Malazan is on my list, but those are pretty dark right?), but I think I'm going to give some others a shot. Maybe Patrick Rothfuss, The Gentleman Bastard? Recommendations welcome.

I'm a big fan of Ms. Marvel and wanted to give the book a shot. The book is a cyberpunk fantasy adventure novel with encryption and hacking themes in an Islamic/Hinduism context. Typically, most cyberpunk novels are written by men in a western context, making it hard to relate. This book speaks to my Indian background and gives me a charged reading experience full of gusto and feel. I quite like the interdisciplinary linkages to languages, scripts, and artificial intelligence.

Just finished a very, very tough section to read. I'm interested to see where she's planning to take the story from here. A greek tragedy would have ended it after this.

When King Leopold’s Ghost was published two decades ago, its only briefly blipped on my radar, leaving me with the vague impression that of the hells European colonisation created in Africa, Léopold’s (and subsequently Belgium’s) Congo was located in the deepest circles. Historical colonialism, however, beyond being bad on principle, was not an issue the liberal German Left was worried about at the end of the 20th century – in part because sympathy for the post colonial struggle was de rigueur, in part out of the entirely unfounded feeling that we Germans got out of that particular pickle just in time.

Fast forward 20 years, and Germany is beginning to acknowledge its colonial past, leaving no way to dismiss the story of the colonial Congo as some other nation’s problem. Colonialism, it turns out, was hellish everywhere, with the German colonies no exception (the chicotte, the rhino hide whip that became eponymous with forced labour and cruelty in Congo, had a name in the German colonies where it was in use, too: Nilpferdpeitsche), and much of Hochschild’s account of the horrific slaughter of about ten million people through, as a consequence of, or as an incidental of violent resource extraction feels like a shameful past we Europeans have in common. Léopold II, Roi des Belges, might have been a particularly greedy bugger, but he was not doing anything much other, less unsavoury, characters, didn’t.

All of which is to say that Hochschild’s book still hits all the right notes long after its original publication. Although not an academic work, it is thoroughly researched, well balanced, always aware of its limitations and blind spots, and so superbly written you will sometimes forget that the breathless yarn you are reliving is one of something that, half a century before the Nuremberg Trials, a prescient observer called “a crime against humanity“.