Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

I read this one in my project to work my way through the piles of unread books that are sitting around. I picked this one up a few months ago during the Borders liquidation. The buying frenzy was apparently on, and I came home with an armful of books, and later looked at some of them and wondered why I had bought them.

I bought Who Fears Death simply because a lot of people were saying good things about it online, which isn't necessarily a good reason to pick up a book. I kept hearing that it was different and original and amazing, so I bought it, even though what I heard about the story didn't necessarily catch my interest.

It is the story of an girl in an Africa-like setting who is obviously a half-breed, whose mother was raped, along with all the other women, and their village burned. Half-breed children like our narrator are viewed as evil and dangerous, and so she has an uncomfortable childhood, despite a loving mother and step-father. And she is an odd, angry child, who develops powers she does not understand or control very well.

This book read too much like YA fiction to me, which is probably partly why I didn't like it. The first half of the book is a coming of age story, and I strongly dislike that story type and usually try to avoid them. Then as she comes into young adulthood and explores her powers and her relationship with a particular young man, she and her friends leave their town to embark on a quest to right injustices that their elders are too complacent to address. I'm simplifying somewhat, but that's what it boils down to, and again, is why this feels like YA. And as they travel they act like 20 year olds, and I could have happily dropped them all down a hole and gone on with my life.

This is a fairly well-written book, don't get me wrong. But it's also a book with a story I didn't enjoy at all, with characters I didn't like, doing things I didn't care about. I did not enjoy the heavy hand of Fate that was obviously pushing them along, nor the promise quite early on that the end of the book is going to be grim, and then there's the female circumcision--if you're going to include that, it seems like a cop-out to me to have her able to later magically undo it.

So, overall: this book has gotten a lot of rave reviews and a World Fantasy Award. But it just wasn't at all enjoyable to me.