Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor (4.5 stars)

After never having read a Nigerian author before, I've read two back to back recently. That's great. This series also promises to be a blockbuster. It's Nigerian harry potter YA fiction.

Sunny is Harry. The outsider brought into a magical world, for which she has a natural talent, but has a lot of catching up to do with children who have already been studying magic for years.

Lambs are Muggles.

Leopard Knocks is Diagon Alley, and the introduction to magic happens in a very similar way through an unusual entrance ritual then a tour of magical shops.

Orlu is Hermione: technically brilliant at magic, but a little cautious, and always getting Sunny out of a tricky spot.

Witch school is in a small group or 1:1 led by experienced teachers, rather than institutional-style Hogwarts.

Ekwensu is Voldemort.

So, assuming you're OK with it following a very established pattern, it's great. The magic feels very different from Harry potter, drawing heavily on Nigerian mythology. The real strength of the novel is those Nigerian experiences: foods, scenery, home life, mythology. All of these feel very foreign to a western reader, and it's a refreshing experience.

I also really like the currency of the Leopard world - you can only gain it by learning something! And it drops from the sky instantly when you do, in proportion to the difficulty of the concept/skill mastered. Not only is that an amazing thought experiment for what capitalism would look like under such conditions, it's a clever literary device to signal to the reader "that was a big deal".

The weaknesses are (some spoiler-ish talk): 

Sunny is a Mary-Sue: she's not only intuitively great at all sorts of magic, she's a pro soccer player. Although I have to cut it some slack on that point, as her soccer prowess was used to challenge the gender stereotyping and sexism in Nigerian society.

This super-powerful community of Leopard people somehow needs a group of inexperienced kids to find a serial killer and stop him from bringing the most powerful masquerade into the regular world.

The good guys win at the climax far too easily and everything is fine. Magic is a very tempting deus ex machina for the author here.

4.5 stars

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (4.5 stars)

This is a spectacular Young Adult fantasy debut novel by Tomi Adeyemi, a Nigerian-American. All the characters in the story are black, but the ruling class k'osidan is a lighter shade, and has brutally suppressed darker skinned maji citizens, especially the once-powerful magicians among them.

The author draws heavily on the Black Lives Matter movement, and there are strong themes of colorism, and racism throughout. Adeyemi says her aim was to teach via fantasy, in a non-preachy way:

“Oh man, I’m going to write a story that’s so good and so black that everyone’s going to have to read it even if you’re racist.”

She's done it. If she can follow up the first with a similar second book, the franchise could be huge. Some spoilers ahead.

Zelie is a realist about her world, the parallel in our modern world is drivingwhileblack, movingwhileblack etc:

He wants to believe that playing by the monarchy’s rules will keep us safe, but nothing can protect us when those rules are rooted in hate.

The difference is in this world Zelie gets an opportunity to put someone from the establishment, someone in a position of power no less, into her shoes by living her worst memories via his magic connector power. He almost instantly switches sides in the war, although things get more complicated towards the end.

There's some annoyances, I'm unsure whether to chalk this up to simplification to keep it YA approachable, but these rubbed me the wrong way:

• Major characters get paired up two by into into nice little symmetic relationships, which doesn't seem particularly plausible.
• Practicality of creating a temporary sea in a desert to sail some ships around in a fight to the death just seems laughable. I know the point was to demonstrate excess, but it's still a desert.
• Why didn't they use magic to just steal the artifact? Playing the ship deathmatch contest was just silly. But even worse, when they won what was supposed to be an unwinnable battle the contest owners just handed over the artifact. Why? It's very naive to think that would actually happen in the real world. These cutthroat blood-sport profiteers would just kill them and keep running the show.
• They almost died getting into a settlement of elite ninjas, but then the ninjas threw them a party, forgot to post guards, and the bad guys waltzed in and killed everybody. You can't be elite ninjas one day and dumb tacticians the next.
• The torture scenes seem way over the top for YA.

But it's a great YA read, I couldn't put it down.

4.5 stars

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson (3.5 stars)

This book is very special, but at the same time I couldn't have read much more of it. Lucky it's very short.

It's a clever look inside the head of an addict, but without a focus or even much of a mention of the drugs, merely what reality looks like through that lens. Things don't make sense, events seem to unfold somewhat at random, and most of the choices of the narrator don't seem particularly logical.

The skill of the writing seems almost wasted on something which is just never going to make any sense, but occasionally there's a dark poetic sentence dropped that reminds you why you are reading this weird thing at all:

But nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or completely horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me.

All day long he watched television from his bed. It wasn’t his physical condition that kept him here, but his sadness.

I'd recommend this, I don't think it's enjoyable, but it's pretty unique.

3.5 stars

Escape from Spiderhead by George Saunders (5 stars)

An amazing short story. What would society by like if we could make a perfect designer drug for almost every purpose? Drugs for truth, drugs for love, drugs for torture. And how would we test their effects on humans? Saunders says his main objective is to provide a wild ride:

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he’s made of sugar.

And boy does he deliver. This short story is fascinating, intense, and brutal with its characters. Reading George's thoughts about they story is also interesting, he didn't intend it to be commentary about pharma testing or treatment of death row prisoners. This was the core:

It might not be the case that one character is purely good, but rather that good is lurking in that person, and the story is about whether the good gets to emerge. And likewise the evil: it sits inside a person, sort of latent, waiting for the right combination of circumstances. 

5 stars.

Winter in the Blood by James Welch (4 stars)

This is a powerful novel, but it is hard to like. Welch is Native American and writes a bleak story of a Native American man stumbling through life, clashing culturally as he moves between the nearby white town and his rural life on a farm. The writing reminded me of Cormac McCarthy:

On it were written the name, John First Raise, and a pair of dates between which he had managed to stay alive.

He has a series of surreal, dreamlike conversations in various seedy bars, and gets mixed up in multiple criminal dealings and fights for no obvious reason apart from feeling detached from life and alien inside this community.

Again I felt that helplessness of being in a world of stalking white men. But those Indians down at Gable's were no bargain either. I was a stranger to both and both had beaten me.

The narration is distant, so I never really felt like I knew the main (unnamed) character, I was mostly just left with a sense of a life with many permanent holes that were far from being filled by a series of sexual encounters with lonely women.

I struggled with rating this book, but I'm giving it 4 stars because I still remember the lost feeling it gave me.

4 stars