Friday, February 1, 2019

A Short and Wild Adventure

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
New York : A Tom Doherty Associates book, 2015.
90 p. ; 20 cm.

Yes, that is 90 p. as in only ninety pages!  But short can be sweet and this little book is captivating.  It's a wildly imaginative science fiction novella that bridges a non-industrial village tribe with an off planet university where the most brilliant  minds of the galaxy go to study.

It fuses a simple coming of age-journey (albeit to a distant planet!) with a shocking massacre and tense intergalactic diplomacy.

I enjoyed it, and it's brevity was refreshing. My hope is that a short book like this might be inviting to those students intimidated by the heftier science fiction/fantasy books that are so common.  I think once tempted, a reader will want more of the same, and with Okorafor there are many more works to sample.

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