Reviews with content warning for Blood - Noor

Reviews tagging 'Blood'

Noor by Nnedi Okorafor

22 reviews

laserdiscreader's review against another edition

adventurous tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Quite a whirlwind of a story. I really enjoyed the story and characters themselves. There were times I had to reread paragraphs because things moved so quickly that I didn't fully grasp what was happening. Okorafor's writing is somehow detailed while feeling incredibly condensed, especially in tense scenes where the main character is describing her experience. It's not necessarily bad, I think it's just been a while since I've read similar prose.

Overall, an enjoyable quick read that will certainly have you reflecting the impact of corporations on the lives of everyone they "serve".

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zombiezami's review against another edition

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emotional mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This is my favorite book by the author that I've read so far!

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nolalee's review against another edition

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challenging dark hopeful mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Noor is a standalone, wildly inventive and imaginative near future in West Africa. With nods to our current time, the story is grounded in reality while blasting off into a futuristic world of cybernetics, surveillance, drones and desert dweller hackers. The plot had some holes that needed more time to be fleshed out before the book ended. Noor feels more like a novella or short story, but maybe that adds to the mystery of AO.

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elly29's review against another edition

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challenging dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Interesting. It poses interesting questions about privacy and self-determination, particularly when large corporations or the government are involved and provide services. Definitely a story about the struggle of traditional-way-of-life against modern-way-of-life, with some interesting Orwellian twists. AO's choices at the end, while sticking up for the herdsmen and those who want to be themselves, also have consequences for the greater global population at large, which I'm not sure I agree with.

But overall, it was a neat story about a cybernetically-enhanced woman, trying to make her own choices.

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laurareads87's review

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adventurous challenging dark reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Having enjoyed quite a few of Nnedi Okorafor's books, I was happy to finally read Noor. The story follows AO, a young Nigerian woman who uses several prosthetics and has had numerous cybernetic body modifications, having been born with physical impairments + later having been in an accident. While some biomedical technologies are accepted in her society (pacemakers, etc.), she is viewed with judgment and targeted with violence for having "too much," being "not person enough." She ends up on the run, with both government agents and a major corporation in pursuit. There are a lot of themes here -- environmental degradation, medical abuse, (lack of) privacy, capitalist exploitation, resource extractive colonialism -- as well as an exciting story with a compelling protagonist that kept me interested start to finish. Recommended.

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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I have thoroughly enjoyed several of Nnedi Okorafor’s books (*cough*Binti*cough*), and found others to be just okay. Noor unfortunately falls into the latter category.

Nnedi’s books are not much for strong plots. This one is very similar to Remote Control in that a girl (in this case, a woman) who is different and powerful and terrifying to everyone else is driven from her home and goes on a long journey. In this case, AO was born with her legs withered and one arm just not there. A car accident in her teens destroyed her legs even further. She chose cybernetic replacements and other technological enhancements that are basically really awesome disability aids (honestly, if I had the option to replace my legs instead of using a cane I’d do it in a heartbeat). But the people around her think because so much of her body is metal that she has somehow become less than human.

On her journey to nowhere in particular, she joins DNA, a herdsman with only two cows after his group and most of their cattle were massacred for being herdsmen. AO wants people to accept that being more high-tech doesn’t make her less human, and DNA wants people to accept that sticking to his people’s traditional ways of life instead of selling his cows and going to work for a global megacorporation doesn’t make him a lesser person.

As is typical of Nnedi’s work, there isn’t much of a plot. The journey is the story, and AO and DNA travel to DNA’s village, through an eternal sandstorm, and other interesting places. The story is told in first person, and AO’s tangents build up the africanfuturist world these characters inhabit. I was interested at first as I was getting oriented to the characters and the world, and then the story started to drag. Neither of the characters had goals, there was no endpoint in sight, and it didn’t feel like either the characters or the story were going anywhere.

AO and DNA finally got to a place that seemed like it would be safe, and they both seemed to like it there. It felt like a reasonable ending for the kind of story this is and I was expecting the story to wrap up soon. But there kept being more chapters. Finally, I checked the timestamp and discovered there was still a quarter of the book to go. I had no idea what would be happening in all that time – neither character had found anything like a goal and there was no current outside threat to escape – and I was getting really tired of following along on what felt like a pointless journey.

So I stopped. I liked the world and the characters could have been interesting if there had been any point to the story. They weren’t going anywhere in particular, they had no goals or objectives – not even “find somewhere safe,” that happened by accident – and I was, quite frankly, bored. If even one of them had been trying to do anything in particular, I think I would have enjoyed this story a lot more.

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piperlee's review against another edition

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adventurous tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.25

things I enjoyed:
- world building!! (okorafor’s specialty, I think)
- allegorical theme
- setting in futuristic Nigeria
- interesting people groups

things that fell flat:
- I didn’t feel any connection to the characters - they were poorly developed
- “emotional” parts didn't feel emotional - again felt underdeveloped
- there wasn’t a clear direction for the story?
- portrayal of disability/AO’s attitude & vocabulary was weird/negative
- several uses of the word “cripple(d)”
- mostly everything just felt like a first draft without the details/dialogue/etc. fleshing out the story to make it feel immersive & interesting

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lizclark81's review against another edition

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adventurous tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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leahrosereads's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

The basics
Enjoyment: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Start: ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5
Characters: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Atmosphere: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Plot: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Ending: ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5
Style: ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5

What I loved
Much like Dr. Okorafor's other novellas, this one starts off with a bang and then doesn't let up. The characters are phenomenally written and it was impossible to not root for them and hope that everything would be OK. AO and DNA go through so much here just trying to stay alive.

A lot of the science and tech went over my head, but I still felt like I was able to enjoy the story and the topics it was exploring.

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pvbobrien's review

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adventurous challenging tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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