Reviews with content warning for Animal death - Who Fears Death

Reviews tagging 'Animal death'

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

11 reviews

bites_of_books's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

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

5.0

Dr. Nnedi Okorafor writes the most interesting characters and hasn't failed for me yet.

Here we follow Onyesonwu throughout her life as she goes through many trials to find out exactly what it is that is her purpose. Onye is a child of rape and is discriminated against because of her mixed heritage, which can be easily seen on her features. Set in a far future Sudan, this novel still carries issues that have been known in the region, such as weaponized rape, child soldiers, violence against women, racism, etc.

I really appreciated how Okorafor built the spiritual and magical aspects of the story. In many ways, they reminded me of magical realism as well as showed me a completely different way to think about ancestors and the way that people can be connected via their spiritual beliefs.

Overall what it came down to were the characters. I love it when characters aren't just the idealized hero and the perfect side characters. They are all flawed in different ways, they might be stubborn, be incredibly impatient, or even let their carnal desires take over when they might need to prioritize other things in their lives.

All in all, if you want to see a completely different take on fantasy that features a strong woman and also strong supporting partner and companions, do check this out. Do take the content warnings seriously before reading though!

Content Warnings

dannilmp's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad tense medium-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? Yes

3.75

This is a book I picked up for the Storygraph reads around the world 2023 challenge, and it was not a disappointing read. A very dark and emotional read, full of a lot of violence, grapic detail and mature themes from the start. I would recommend a thorough checking of trigger warnings beore reading this novel.

We follow a female sorcerer, unusual for the times, as she goes on a journey to discover more about herself in a world who views her as a threat just for the circumstances of her birth. I feel there is a lot to reflect on within this novel about the nature of human beings, the advancements of technology and what we can learn moving forward.

While I thought the overall novel was great, I did get a little bit lost reading the epilogue and trying to figure out what this meant for the ending of the story and how this epilogue fits in. I still haven't come up with a satisfying conclusion days later.

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blackbird2210's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional inspiring mysterious reflective fast-paced

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

5.0

Beautifully written. The world building, magical elements, and character relationship are amazing.

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kharlan3's review against another edition

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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slow-paced

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

3.0

Note: This review discusses rape in several places because rape is an essential plot point. If rape is a trigger for you, take care of yourself and skip both this book and this review.

I was not all that excited to read this book. In fact, I passed over it several times because that back cover just didn’t sound appealing. But then I read The Book of Phoenix, which happened to be a prequel to this one. I loved The Book of Phoenix, so I decided I might as well give Who Fears Death a shot.

I have a lot to say about this book, and most of it has to do with the book overall. The details were, for the most part, strong. One of the best part of all of Nnedi’s books are the africanfuturism settings that beautifully combines technology just advanced enough from what we have to make it sci-fi with enthralling small villages and great deserts in near-future Africa. The worldbuilding is absolutely stellar.

Where it struggles is everywhere else. The story here feels very much like one of Nnedi’s “woman who is hated and feared for some aspect of how she was born goes on a long journey to nowhere in particular” plots (see Noor and Remote Control), just with more setup – Onyesonwu doesn’t leave the village until over halfway through the book. But this book attempts to give Onyesonwu’s travels in the desert a destination and a purpose. The purpose makes the desert-wandering feeling seem incongruous, and the desert-wandering feeling makes the purpose feel cheap and unnecessary. I just didn’t think it worked.

That’s how the book felt overall – like the story was trying to smash together two very different approaches and not succeeding at either. It took ideas for a plot-focused book – a uniquely powerful main character with a unique appearance who learns to use her innate magic to fulfill the prophecy that she will end the great evil plaguing the land – and tried to shove them into a character-focused story.

I’m using “character-focused” in the loosest sense of the term, because the focus is on only Onyesonwu’s rage. She very clearly has every right to be angry, but that is the only thing that seems to matter in this book. It glosses over interesting plot happenings and interesting character development alike. The story is driven by Onyesonwu getting angry, doing something incredibly stupid (which she usually recognizes was stupid as soon as she calms down), and then having to deal with the consequences.

Who Fears Death is also unrelentingly violent. It’s said right on the back cover that Onyesonwu was born from rape. What isn’t mentioned is that that rape is described in graphic detail multiple times, as well as several other rapes and one attempted rape. There’s also murder, genocide, physical violence, and more, all described with vivid, bloody thoroughness. (There was also some fairly graphic consensual sexual content between two minors, which wasn’t actually violent but still very uncomfortable.) It was very hard to read in many places, but in some ways it felt like that was the point. I mean this in the best possible way, but it felt a bit like the author was using the process of writing this to work through some stuff. There’s a scene in the book where Onyesonwu is trying to convince her village that genocide is really happening and they need to act. Nobody is listening to her, so she uses her magic to broadcast her mother’s experience of being raped to every one of them. In a way, this book feels a lot like it’s trying to do the same thing. There was a strong sense of “All of this has happened to real people in other places, the least you can do is read about it.”

I finished reading this not because I particularly wanted to, but because by the time I got around to thinking about switching to a different audiobook, I was two hours from the end and I figured I might as well finish. The whole story felt flat – not as in without depth or emotion, but as in without variation. There was no rising and falling action, no moments of heightened conflict or moments of respite. Onyesonwu’s rage was constant, the pace was constant, the violence never stopped, and the climax didn’t even feel like a climax because the pace and rage and violence were exactly the same as the rest of the book. I found the ending profoundly unsatisfying, for reasons that include spoilers:

Onyesonwu attacked the antagonist twice with magic and spent half a year walking across the desert just so she could use her rage and her magic to kill him, only to fall in a terrified sobbing heap the instant she saw him in person, leaving her romantic partner to do the thing she went all that way to do.

What I wanted from this book was something plot-focused. More about Onyesonwu learning to use her magic and the strange spiritual world of the Wilderness, magic as a weapon and a tool with more details about its possibilities and limitations, the prophecy leading to a quest-style journey, a climax that involved a great magical duel between Onyesonwu and the antagonist. I also would have accepted something that made magic and prophecies the backdrop to a friends-to-lovers romance, complicated but unbreakable friendships, an antagonist-to-surrogate-father relationship with her magic teacher, and self-reflection and love and advice from friends leading to personal growth and fewer rash actions. But Who Fears Death tried to do both at the same time, and ended up making something that wasn’t satisfying on either level.

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ashley_elizabeth's review

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challenging emotional medium-paced

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

3.75

This is a difficult book for me to review, for several reasons. The biggest challenge, for me, is that I found the second half of the book (Part 3) much more engaging than the first; second, it was difficult to read fairly frequent references to terrible things (see all the content warnings) that are happening to people throughout the story.
That being said, the tale of Onyesonwu and her companions was thrilling. I've not read much that involves mythology from Africa so this was a treat and I plan to read more works, especially those of Okorafor, that explore this subject matter in a fantastical setting.

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kylieqrada's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny sad medium-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? Yes

4.0

I was so psyched to find a copy of this at Value Village when we were visiting family on the west side. Dr. Okorafor is one of the most iconic names in Afrofuturism, and while this is clearly one of her early works, that doesn't lessen the impact that it has. The writing, although not as developed in style as her later works, is conversational and even funny at times. I liked how that narrative choice cut through the intense topics that this book covers. Speaking of which, CHECK CW'S BEFORE PICKING THIS ONE UP, Y'ALL. Dr. Okorafor pulls no punches, and the ending leaves you pretty much desperate for the second book. I'd recommend it if you can handle the subject matter and don't mind a little bit of an odd tone.

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