A review by mitskacir
Binti: The Complete Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor

2.0

Ugh this book was such a slog for me. I am clearly not the right audience for it, because it has garnered so many rave reviews from others. I struggled mostly with the writing, which I don't think I had an issue with in Who Fears Death (perhaps because Binti is marketed more as YA?)- Okorafor seemed to contradict herself frequently (that or the characters changed their minds, but this wasn't well explained), the text was highly repetitive (possibly a function of binge reading the 4 novellas in a row, but I noticed it even in the first book), and the plot gave me whiplash - it felt like I was a ping pong ball being flung from one emotional even to the next (A sandstorm! A family fight! A mysterious object breaking! A war!) with no clear reason for why one event followed another. The sci-fi elements garnering little to no explanation of how they worked, which is a big turn off for me in most sci-fi or fantasy books. This would have been a DNF for me, except that a friend chose it for our bookclub so I felt obliged to complete it.