Review: Who Fears Death

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was amazing. One of the first fantasy novels I've read in a while AND the first book since the Expanse series to keep me flipping pages. I couldn't put this down!

Onyesonwu is a young African girl, the product of a violent rape, who is only alive because of her mother's determination to keep her child safe. Her mother is an Okeke, a tribe of dark-skinned Africans whose fate, according to their religion, is to serve the Nuru, a tribe of light-skinned Africans. Her father is Nuru, and the child of such a pair - called Ewu - is visibly marked by their golden skin and hair and freckles. Onyesonwu is also different because she has power.

Around her eleventh birthday, she experiences 2 things: circumcision, and a sudden revelation of magical ability. Both reveal that her biological father is looking for her and looking to kill her. She spends her teens trying to convince people to train her to use and control her juju so she can defend herself from her father when the time comes. But she eventually takes on a larger mission - trying to change the relationship between the Nuru and the Okeke people.

The characters in this story were beautifully crafted. Onyesonwu and her friends and family care for each other, but also hurt each other, and you feel both that love and that pain. This was also a great example of how reading what you're not familiar with can be an incredibly rewarding experience partly because of that unfamiliarity - I don't think I've ever read a fantasy set in Africa or even a mythical land with African influences, so the setting and the tropes and the customs were new to me, and I delighted in the experience of watching them unfold with no expectations of what should happen or what typically happens.

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