Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An award-winning literary author presents her first foray into supernatural fantasy with a novel of post- apocalyptic Africa.

In a far future, post-nuclear-holocaust Africa, genocide plagues one region. The aggressors, the Nuru, have decided to follow the Great Book and exterminate the Okeke. But when the only surviving member of a slain Okeke village is brutally raped, she manages to escape, wandering farther into the desert. She gives birth to a baby girl More...

I've kept an eye on Nnedi Okorafor's career for a while now. Her books always intrigued me-I have a hard time resisting anything post-apocalyptic,* and hers are set in Africa, a great antidote to the typical lily-white American version-but the fact that they were always targeted at young adults kept me away. I like books to have some subtlety about them, paragraphs that don't have the same words in each sentence, lines of dialogue that don't end with "she said ___ly." (To be fair these are certa More...

Onyesonwu is the outcast child of a mother who cannot speak above a whisper. Her skin and hair clearly mark her as Ewu, a child of both Nuru and Okeke, a combination despised by Nuru and Okeke alike. Her gender makes the only sorcerer in the village unwilling to teach her. And her shapeshifting and nigh-uncontrollable magic make her neighbors fear and hate her. After her father dies and her magical powers manifest themselves at his funeral, she flees into the desert to avoid mob violence and to More...

A number of reviewers have talked about how they struggled with how dark the book was; how difficult it was to read accounts of rape and genital mutilation and racial genocide. There would, I think, be something wrong with me if I didn't find reading about that sort of thing viscerally unpleasant, but all were integral parts of the book's world building, and while they may have made reading some sections an uncomfortable experience, they didn't detract from my appreciation of the work as a whole More...

I read a lot of speculative fiction, and I can say I've never read anything like this before. Well, first the obvious - this takes place in Africa, but even more the sorcery is more akin to religious/spiritual powers outside Judeo-CHristian belief systems. So that was very cool. I found the writing a bit choppy, and I was somewhat detached. I very much look forward to more from Nnedi Okorafor, she provides food for thought, that's for sure. The ending was a great twist, too.

I somehow missed the fact that this book was meant to be post-apocalyptic (not a spoiler - apparently everyone knew it but me) until near the end, and therefore read it as a tale set in an alternate magical Africa. It had all of the touchstones of a fantasy quest, right down to the villain's all-seeing eye, albeit in a decidedly different setting. I had to recalibrate partway through, but I was so caught up that I didn't mind.

This is an excellent story, blending quest, myth, magic, cautionary t More...

(Copy of my Amazon review)

Set in an alternate/post-apocalyptic/futuristic African desert (with magic) "Who Fears Death" opens with a teenage Onyesonwu at her father's funeral. Grieving, she briefly and unintentionally starts to bring him back to life. She is a sorcerer, feared and hated because of her powers and her parentage. Her abilities, though spectacular, mostly endanger her and cause her suffering. But they also lead her on a quest to save her mother's people from impending war, slavery, More...

Who fears death takes place in post-apocalyptic Africa. Two different races exist the Okeke who are enslaved by the Nuru. The Nuru follow the Great Book as their gospel and plan to exterminate the Okeke. A third race called Ewu has been fromed who are the children of Okeke and Nuru. Love between the Okeke and Nuru is forbidden so these children are labeled as children of rape.

We follow the story of Onyesonwu who is Ewu. Her mother was raped by a Nuru man who invaded her village. She is raised f More...

This is a very difficult book to rate. It has a strong beginning and a very strong ending but what lies between the two is rather weak.

Onyesonwu is a bi-racial female in post-apocalyptic Sudan. The first half is her growing up as an outcast and beginning her training as a sorceress. The second half is her journeying across the desert to confront her evil sorcerer father, revenge her mother and hopefully end the racial genocide. It starts out with minor magic realist elements then slowly adds in More...

I really wanted to enjoy this book--but I couldn't. And perhaps that was the point. Okorafor uses the trappings of fantasy--a young sorceress, her training, a prophetic quest--to discuss dark subject matters, particularly, the matter of sub-Saharan Africa. So it's an oddly compelling mash-up of Chinua Achebe and a J.K. Rowling coming of age novel. Issues, like weaponized rape, genocide, slavery, color-caste racism, genital mutilation, and sexism exist along side casual magic (shape-shifting, tel More...

“ Just by looking at me, everyone can see that I am a child of rape.”

Onyesonwu lives in a future Sudan. Her mother is Okeke, her father is Nuru and she is Ewu. The Nurus have enslaved the Okeke and want to rid the world of them. Onyesonwu (view spoiler)[like her father Genral Daib and her mother (hide spoiler)] is a sorceress. She can take the shape of animals, travel great distances, including into the spirit world, and become invisible. She sets off west to kill her father and heal the people and land, on a hero’s journey More...

This book ruled. It's structurally just another traditional Hero(ine)'s Journey story, but the unique setting, themes, and characters set it apart. I loved Onyesonwu, the stubborn, strong protagonist. Her relationships with her lover, friends, family, and mentor were complex and believable.

It's a fantasy and very fantastical at that--but is grounded in some very real and dark issues. The story is set in post apocalpytic Sudan, where genocide, weaponized rape, and female circumcision are common. More...

This is a magnificent, intense, powerful book that totally deserves the World Fantasy Award it just received. So much about it is unexpected; Okorafor takes ideas that have always only gone one way and turns them around, not for the sake of doing something different, but because the story demands it. I find it very difficult to explain exactly how I felt in reading it, but I both couldn't stop reading and had to take frequent breaks to come up for air.

Some of those differences: This is good post More...

I'm not going to lie, this book is a hard read. I'm not saying that it's hard to read, but it starts off with a child of rape and details why she's hated and how she came into being.

One of the great things about this book is its sense of place. You get a feeling for the culture and the people and the environment. There is no sense that this is set in a vague, fantasy setting. The author knows exactly where this book takes place.

I also liked how it took the tropes of golden age and modern fantasy More...

KOBOBOOKS

Reviewed by SF Reviews

Not finished yet, but it's WONDERFUL so far!

First line: "My life fell apart when I was sixteen."

A 2010 Nebula award nominee. I'm willing to believe it deserves it, but I'm unlikely to know, since I've stopped reading it.

I got through the village massacre/gang rape scene. I got through the stoning scene five pages later. But a few pages after that, when it looked like there was going to be a whole chapter about female circumcision, I was done.

Edit 4/2/11: I've since discovered the author has retweeted my review. I'm not entirely sure how More...

Fantastic. Speculative fiction written with so much originality and passion, I can forgive the flat-out-bad bad guy and an ending that's somewhat unsatisfying.

Onyesonwu sees her death in a vision, at her initiation as a worker of magic. ("Magic" goes by other, more specific names in the book, and is well defined. I can't stand it when an author just lets whatever happen and calls it "magic.") This vision is like a ball that drops from high up at the top of the novel, so that for the rest of the More...

Despite the good reviews and the cool cover, I was a little reluctant to read this book because the dust jacket flap copy made it sound as if book was full of violence and a total postapocalyptic downer. But the flap copy was merely trying to cash in on the current craze for gore and grit, I think. This is not a lighthearted book by any means, but the amount of violence is appropriate for an adventure book in which the heroine has to stop a crazed wizard before he kills her. None of the apocalyp More...

A dazzling, if occasionally dry, mixture of SF and low fantasy, Who Fears Death follows an outcast girl in deep-future Africa. Both blessed and cursed by her ties to nature (I'll stay vague to avoid spoilage), Onyesonwu - whose double-edged name means "Who Fears Death" - refuses to accept the inferior status heaped upon her. Gathering a group of friends, she leaves her apathetic community behind and rushes to meet a hazardous destiny.

Revealing details would suck a lot of the fun from this book. More...

(Refers to the audiobook.)

"A journey."

This book is a journey, and it is at times an intentionally uncomfortable one. Set in a (far?) future subsaharan Africa, racially-based genocides continue between the Nuru and the Okeke. An "Ewu" girl (the result of the rape of an Okeke by a Nuru man) is given the name Onyesonwu -- "Who Fears Death". This book has magic -- in particular: shape-shifting, and traveling to The Wilderness, the space where spirits go after life -- and sand, and violence -- though More...

Probably one of my favorite books I've read in quite a while.

I won't recap the premise of the book, but I was a little unsure of it at first. The plot made me think of an African version of Harry Potter, determined to defeat evil with the help of magic and, most of all, by relying on friends. Sounded a bit like the coming-of-age stuff I usually steer clear of.

There is a lot of adult content in this book, both violent and sexual. Nothing is so overt that it detracts from the story, though.

The cha More...

There are a lot of themes and thoughts packed into this book, which in some ways is great -- it's thought-provoking, and the cultural details are engrossing. But at times it felt overstuffed with Important Things, and by the end of the book I felt as though something had come unhinged, a feeling made worse by an ambiguous ending.

The first half of the book is a mix of Onyesonwu's childhood and exploratory worldbuilding. Our introduction to Onyesonwu's world is violent and sadly familiar, and the More...

Onyesonwu, a young woman conceived through violent means, has magical powers nearly beyond her control and an evil father who is bent on her destruction.

Nnedi Okorafor does an excellent job of catching the reader's attention and interest in the opening of the novel, but after nearly 100 pages still fails to offer anything new to further motivate the reader to keep going. Her punchy, short-sentenced style is remeniscent of Octavia E. Butler, as is her suject, bringing to mind the African-descende More...

"To be something abnormal meant that you were to serve the normal. And if you refused, they hated you... and often the normal hated you even when you did serve them."

In Nnedi Okorafor’s post-apocalyptic Sudan, there are two predominant ethnic factions: the light-skinned Nuru and the dark-skinned Okeke. Who Fears Death takes place amid a genocide that the Nuru commit against the Okeke, a campaign that (like genocides in our own time) includes both murder and rape. The mixed-race offspring of a Nu More...

I was simply spellbound by this book, from beginning to end. Onyesonwu's story supposedly takes place in a distant future, in the Seven Rivers Kingdom, which "used to be part of the Kingdom of Sudan." But everything was so realistic that it could as easily be said to be taking place right now. And, even though I often have a problem with suspending my disbelief when reading magical realism, that didn't happen here. The "juju" and other powers fit so seamlessly into the story that they didn't see More...

I don't think there has ever been a book like this before. One of the things a novel can achieve is to take the reader into a place -- geographical, emotional, spiritual, magical -- otherwise inaccessible. Here our difficult story begins in a brutal, awful scene of war, not what I would ordinarily choose to read, but the skill of the writer brings me precariously through its despair. Now ahead of us sprawls an epic incredible ordeal, firmly fantasy, roughly realistic, ugly and unprecedented, bra More...