Bookish Thoughts

In the final installment of the Binti  trilogy, Binti goes through some serious growing pains. The previous books had her discovering new aspects of herself. Everything she learned seemed to take her further from her family of origin, even the things she learned about the history of that family. And so here she must learn how to balance all this growth with staying true to herself and her values. This book, and the whole trilogy really, explore how far you can stray from your roots while remaining rooted. How much can you change and still be recognizable as the same person? What's that essential bit of you-ness that remains immutable? By the end, Binti is both unrecognizable, having been modified with alien DNA, microbes, and technology, and essentially the same person, a math whiz who values knowledge and harmony. She's still in the process of accepting all the change she's gone through. But the ending is optimistic that she'll fully integrate her new experiences w...

The second book in the Binti  trilogy asks whether you can ever go home again. In the first book, Binti defied her family to run away from home and attend a galactic university. Now that she's been studying there for a year, she decides that it's time to return home to make amends with her family and participate in a coming-of-age ritual. Of course, nothing goes according to plan. Binti: Home  was nearly twice as long as the first book (at a whopping 160 pages), and I was right that the extra length made it easier for me to get past the style and sink into the story. Which was great, because there was a lot of interesting stuff going on here. Binti has to navigate her own goals and desires and balance them against those of her family and society. She learns that she's going to have to make certain sacrifices to pursue the life she wants, and she grieves their loss. Hand in hand with this is an exploration of the tension between tradition and progress. Binti learns more ...

Binti  felt like a story that Octavia Butler might have written. Which is high praise for Nnendi Okorafor who writes just as widely and deeply as Butler did, exploring themes of of power and communication and always centering her books on black protagonists, which causes her themes to resonate on multiple levels. As with Butler's work, I struggled a bit with Okorafor's style in this story. It's straight-forward and stark, whereas I prefer my prose to be at least a little bit purple. The lack of embellishing language makes it harder for me to get invested in the tale. And while I can usually find my feet near the beginning of a 300 page novel, it was a bit harder with a 90 page novella. I felt like I was still acclimating to this world when the story ended. That said, the story itself was interesting and challenging. Binti is on her way to a galactic university when her ship is attacked by an alien species that's at war with another faction of humans - a faction Bint...