Binti (Binti, #2)

by Nnedi Okorafor

[sa090]

After two entertaining books, there’s bound to be one that is no where near as entertaining, too bad that it just feels like wasted potential.

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This is the first time I read a book by Nnedi Okorafor, the only reason I did it is because I wanted to get a feel of her writing style for further reading and unfortunately, this particular piece of writing leaves way too much to be desired. The ideas in themselves are interesting, feel like a kind of a unique-ish setting and it creates this huge universe that I would really enjoy exploring but like Ursula La Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea, it just fails to deliver the amazing journey I was hoping to experience (how ironic is it that the before mentioned praised this book, huh?). We started out just fine with the different species, learning more about them, learning about the professions and the school they were all heading to but once the encounter with the Meduse happens; it just goes downhill from there.

I have learned this year that I may have a serious issue when characters or more like authors who spend more time describing things and having a sort of a never ending monologue about everything instead of actual dialogue. Because of the way this novella went, that approach might’ve been the more logical and probable turn of events but here’s the thing, Binti is written in a way that makes the internal struggle/conversation she has boring to read which made it hard to read more than 20 pages at a time in this very short novella. Literally less than 100 pages and it still took 3 days of me to read it.

The matter of how convenient some things were for her in this journey were also a con to me thanks to how utterly destructive that addition was to the whole situation. There is nothing worse than a supposed survival story where the author adds things that just kills the tension, what is the actual point to a story like this if we’re just going to give her a few things that will magically resolve all dangerous plot points without fail? Honestly, it just felt like a pointless thing to read after that happened.

Other than that, the way this was resolved in the very end was unrealistic, disappointing and felt like a quick fix because Nnedi Okorafor wanted to end this novella. Of course because of the unrealistic setting in the first place, I might not be supposed to take this resolution way too seriously or rather apply my morals to it but if we’re taking humans as our focus point then I expect human like behaviour despite how ridiculous a setting may or may not be.

Really disappointed with this and if it wasn’t built on the basis of really interesting elements it would’ve gotten a 1/5 from me. As a bit of extra trivia if you will, Binti means “my daughter” in Arabic which was honestly the only thing I could think about whenever I read it.

Final rating: 2/5