Feb 14

Feb 14 Death of the Author

About the book

Author: Nnedi Okorafor
Publisher: William Morrow

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.

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My Review

I’ve been a Nnedi Okorafor fan for a long time, and her new releases are always cause for excitement in the SFF community. But this one felt like it was getting some *extra* buzz, and from a broader range of review publications, which made me even more excited to read it. Unsurprisingly, this genre-bender not only delivers but also hits differently than anything else she’s written.

Death of the Author gives us a book-within-a-book, going back and forth between the story of a quadriplegic Nigerian-American woman writer named Zelu and the post-apocalyptic science fiction robot novel that catapults her to fame. Both stories function amid the backdrop of Nigerian culture, storytelling, and mythology. Zelu is expertly crafted: fierce, compelling, and believable. I didn’t like her much, but I was rooting for her, especially with all her family drama (even if there was a bit too much of that in this story for my personal taste).

Okorafor not only blurs lines between genres but also, at the end (that ending!!), subverts our expectations in a way that challenges us to reconsider the very act of storytelling — the thing that makes us human — itself. Readers who like both contemporary fiction and sci-fi will love this, probably followed by contemporary fiction readers who don’t mind added sci-fi or speculative elements, followed by die-hard sci-fi readers. Either way, definitely read this if you like genre play and exploration and books that challenge how stories can work.