012023

A Mini-review of Several Books

I spent most of yesterday reading City of Brass by Chakraborty. The book mostly takes place in the hidden world of djinn. Then last night I went to the monthly meeting of the fantasy book club here and we discussed the series, as well as other books. I heard a lot of negative things about City of Brass and its sequels, the most telling of which was the interminable love triangle. (There was also a lot of politics, torture, and murder.) So I went back to reading it last night and the love triangle reared its ugly head again. I just couldn't take it.

The other book I read for this month's meeting was Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor. A very smoothly written and eerie book. Not as inventive world building as City of Brass, but I liked it better. It was shorter, too, for what that's worth. This is, in my opinion, an SF novel. A cluster of meteors fall to Earth in Ghana. A part of one of them inhabits a five-year-old girl, giving her mysterious powers. She masters her powers, learns how to handle herself in society, and embarks on a quest to find the source of her power. The setting is contemporary. I don't know much about Ghana, but it feels like it could happen tomorrow.

I had the same problem last year with Ken Liu as with Chakraborty. He wrote a trilogy, each book of which was equivalent to about three ordinary books, and it just went on and on with politics, torture, and murder. We have that in real life; I don't need to read about it. Good world building though.

I'll read more by Okorafor, and look for more young authors I like.