Book two of four in Okorafor’s series featuring a young human woman who decides to follow her prodigious mathematical abilities and become the first of her insular people to travel to a distant solar system and attend the galaxy’s greatest university. The first book was about her decision to go and the unexpected sequence of events that followed. This book is about her first return home, and further learning about herself, her people, and her abilities. From what I understand, books three and four get longer, but the first two are extremely short, and perhaps what’s most remarkable about both of them is how able the author is to make both the worldbuilding and the story feel so rich in so few words. It’s also really neat that while many of the themes touched on in this book are frequently present in mainstream sci-fi or other literature in ways that are implicitly or explicitly organized around the cluster of historical trajectories and power relations that get normalized as “whiteness” – themes like relating to and across cultural difference, tensions between individual freedom and family/collective responsibilities, stereotypes about “primitive” and “advanced” peoples, metropolitan versus self-secluding sensibilities, even things like technology and education – here, they are considered in ways that I suppose in some senses subvert whiteness but that more importantly are just not about and not interested in whiteness. As with everything of Okorafor’s I’ve read so far, it’s really good stuff and well worth reading.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.