African-American – Page 2 – Required Reading

African-American, Fiction, Speculative Fiction

Temper

August 7, 2018July 26, 2018 Shay Shortt

Nicky Drayden

ISBN 978-0-06249305-7

Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher.

“As soon as the soles of my worn loafers hit pavement outside the school, my proximity with Kasim breaks and the queasiness is back. The emotions that Kasim’s closeness had tempered come raging forth so quickly, I pitch over from their impact in my gut.”

With six vices to his brother’s six virtues, and only one virtue of his own, Auben Mtuze is what society calls a lesser twin, just like his mother. While his aunt and cousins live in luxury on the other side of the wall, Auben’s family ekes out a living inside the confines of the slums. One day his brother Kasim, a greater twin, might hope to rise up, but will he, like so many before him, leave his lesser twin behind when he goes? Growing up often means growing apart, even for bonded twins who can temper one another by their presence. Auben and Kasim have always been close, but when Auben begins hearing voices that goad him to indulge his vices, and he develops an inexplicable craving for blood, their fragile bond may be stretched to the breaking point, and beyond.

Nicky Drayden sets her sophomore novel in an alternate South Africa with its own unique mythology and history. Through the process of Discernment, twins are branded early with the distribution of their vices and virtues. Lesser twins, and singletons—those born without a twin—are both looked down upon. Religion teaches that the first twins were the gods Grace and Icy Blue, one all virtue, the other all vice, and that all twins are their creations. Secular science teaches than twins and kigen—male/female fraternal twin pairs that have shared DNA in the womb and thus created additional genders—are the result of genetics, but science is secretive and supressed in this world. These distinctions and classes set up a world that is rife with tension, both within and between families.

In both Temper and her first novel, The Prey of the Gods, Drayden is interested in examining what separates gods from people. In her worlds, these boundaries are decidedly imperfect, and even permeable, particularly when science and religion meet. Kasim and Auben are deliberately raised secular, but their six-and-one tempering places them at the extreme, and sends them searching for answers in all directions, including to Gabadamosi, the elite religious private school their cousins attend. Though this world is supposedly ruled by Grace and his virtues, it proves to be a no less complicated place than the slums, albeit with different dangers, because even the virtuous are human, with myriad talents for screwing things up.

On her website, Drayden lists her favourite authors as Neal Stephenson, Octavia Butler, and Christopher Moore, a blend which accurately evokes the atmosphere of her two books to date, combining Stephenson and Butler’s grimmer sci-fi talents with Moore’s weirdness and humour. Drayden describes Temper as “a story caught somewhere between dark fantasy and horror.” Certainly there is an element of the surreal about her work, as well an ambitious, genre-spanning scope. I quickly learned to stop trying to predict what was going to happen, and simply go along for the ride as Drayden raced through a plot that could easily have been stretched over multiple volumes in the hands of a different writer. Unlike The Prey of the Gods’ multiple narrators, Temper is told only from Auben’s perspective, but it still covers a lot of ground. Every plot twist left me pleasantly stunned by Drayden’s weirdly fresh imagination.

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You might also like Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

African-American, Fiction, LGBTQIA+, Young Adult

Fall 2018 Fiction Preview

July 31, 2018July 18, 2018 Shay Shortt

Last month, I spent an extended weekend in New Orleans, attending the American Library Association’s annual conference. In addition to meeting up with colleagues, and attending workshops, I also hit up several book buzz sessions, and visited the various publishers in the exhibit hall. Disclaimer: the publishers were giving out ARCs of many of these titles, and I picked up copies where I could, but I haven’t had a chance to get down to reading most of them yet, so these are just a few of the titles I’m particularly excited to read in the coming months.

A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua

When Scarlett Chen falls in love with, and is impregnated by, her boss at a Chinese factory, the father of her child is elated to learn that he will finally have a son. Eager to secure every advantage for his long-awaited heir, he ships Scarlett off to a secret maternity hotel in Los Angeles, so that their son will be born with American citizenship. Scarlett doesn’t fit in with the upper-class women who can afford such a measure, and when a new sonogram leads to a startling revelation, she decides to steal a van, and disappear into Los Angeles’ bustling Chinatown. What she doesn’t expect is a stowaway, and an angry lover hot on her heels. River of Stars will be available from Penguin Random House August 14, 2018.

Pride by Ibi Zoboi

If you love a good Pride and Prejudice remix, get ready for Pride, a young adult African-American retelling set in gentrifying Brooklyn. Zuri Benitez is proud of her Afro-Latina roots, but the Bushwick she once knew seems to be disappearing before her eyes. Her newest neighbours are the wealthy Darcy family, and while her sister Janae seems enamoured of their son Ainsley, Zuri wants nothing to do with his brother Darius. In the midst of family drama, and looming college applications, will Zuri and Darius be able to find common ground? Look for it from HarperCollins September 18, 2018.

Jack of Hearts by L. C. Rosen

Out and proud, it isn’t hard to convince Jack to write a sex advice column for his best friend Jenny’s website. But then the gossip mill starts churning, and soon Jack is receiving threatening notes from a mysterious stalker, who doesn’t like the fact that Jack is proud and comfortable in his skin. Jack of Hearts is already getting buzz for being own voices, queer, and sex positive, and billed as a potential game changer for discussions about sex and sex ed in Young Adult literature. If it’s half as good as the early buzz, you’ll be eagerly awaiting its October 30, 2018 release from Little Brown. (Also, check out that cover!)

Little White Lies by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Fans of The Naturals and The Fixer, take note! Jennifer Lynn Barnes has a new YA mystery headed your way this fall. Sawyer Taft is a talented mechanic, so the last thing she ever expected was to find her estranged grandmother on her doorstep, offering her a six-figure contract to be a debutante. But Sawyer quickly realizes that this unusual offer may be her only chance to discover the answer to a question that has haunted her for her whole life–who is her father? But as she begins mixing in high society, Sawyer quickly realizes that her family’s secrets are tied up with those of other powerful families, and investigating the past may unearth a lot of skeletons that those movers and shakers would rather stay buried. Coming your way November 6, 2018 from Freeform.

In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

Now technically this one isn’t due out until January 2019, so you can imagine my pleasure and surprise at landing an ARC! Katherine Victoria Lundy is a steadfast and serious young girl, and perhaps the last person you would expect to stumble upon a door to another world. But some worlds are founded on logic an reason, fair value and honest bargains. And so it is that Lundy opens a door to the Goblin Market, and finds her true home. But it wouldn’t be fair value to keep a child who is too young to decide, and so Lundy must periodically return to her own world, and the strings that tie her back there grow stronger with each visit. Spoiler alert: I read this one cover to cover on the plane ride home, and it might just be the best Wayward Children book yet! Set your countdown for January 8, 2019, and curse Tor if you don’t want to wait that long.

African-American, Fantasy, Fiction, Young Adult

Children of Blood and Bone

June 12, 2018June 12, 2018 Shay Shortt

by Tomi Adeyemi

ISBN 978-1-250-17097-2

“Deep down, I know the truth. I knew it the moment I saw the maji of Ibadan in chains. The gods died with our magic. They are never coming back.”

Once, Orïsha was the land of maji, ten powerful clans, each with their own unique powers to command earth or water, life or death. But eleven years ago, King Saran conducted the Raid, cutting the maji off from their gods, and killing every practitioner old enough to have come into their powers. Only the divîners remain. Children at the time of the Raid, they will live their entire lives under the heel of the Royal Guard, derided as maggots, never coming into their inheritance. It seems that the gods have abandoned Orïsha. But tension is brewing in the royal family. Princess Amari’s best friend is a divîner named Binta, who serves as her chamber maid, and Prince Inan is hiding a dark secret of his own. Having lost her mother in the Raid, a young divîner named Zélie harbours a deep resentment for the royal family, and a longing for the Reaper powers she should have inherited on her thirteenth birthday. Instead, she trains to fight with a staff, and dreams of a day when the divîners will rise up against their oppressors. But the gods have plans to throw some unusual allies in her path.

Children of Blood and Bone is made up of short chapters from several narrative points of view, including Zélie, Amari, and Inan. Zélie is joined in her quest by her brother Tzain, a promising athlete who takes after their kosidán father, rather than their maji mother. Adeyemi employs short chapters that have a slightly choppy pacing. Point of view changes are frequently accompanied by a time jump as well as a change of location. She tends to leap straight into the action after each transition, but I was frequently distracted from settling into whatever was going on by first needing to figure out the relative timing. It sometimes seemed that Adeyemi intended these jumps to add an element of surprise; by disjointing the timing between the chapters, she could cut straight to an encounter that the reader might otherwise have assumed could not take place yet. In general, however, I did not find this technique to be effective.

One of the characters I wanted to know more about was Binta, as I felt that her friendship with Princess Amari was necessarily a complex relationship that deserved more depth. Binta is a divîner, the only such to serve in a prominent place at court as Amari’s handmaid. It is specified that she is a paid servant, not a slave, but she is still a member of an oppressed group, and her relationship to Amari is therefore fraught with certain baggage. However, she is not a character that we get to meet or interact with directly. Instead, her death is a motivating factor for Amari, a moment of awakening to the injustices her father has been responsible for perpetrating against the divîners, who are referred to as maggots by those who do not share their magical heritage. As such, Binta is a character who exists largely in Amari’s memories and regrets.

Although the complexity of Binta’s situation was glossed over, I was able to see Adeyemi’s adeptness at handling such a power imbalance in the relationships that she subsequently builds between Zélie and Amari, and Zélie and Inan. Zélie has difficulty with trust, and does not always give it wisely, especially when her hand is forced by circumstance. Both Amari and Inan are shown grappling in different ways with their family legacy. Inan has to discover if he can maintain his father’s convictions when he is not directly under his eye, and Amari is faced with the realities of the world for the first time after a sheltered life inside the palace walls in Lagos. She has been trained to fight in theory, but she has never had to carry it out in practice until she defies her father and runs away. Adeyemi also did an excellent job with the sibling relationship between Tzain and Zélie, and I look forward to seeing her further develop Amari and Inan’s sibling dynamic as they decide whether they will perpetuate or defy the values their father has taught them.

Adeyemi has laid down the foundations of a rich world and magical system, albeit one that is in abeyance, more memory than practice for much of Children of Blood and Bone. This first volume is about the fight to restore magic, and explores the question of how the absence of power shapes a people. There is much interesting ground to be covered in the question of what happens when an oppressed group gains power and must figure out how to use it responsibly. Despite some choppy parts, I am looking forward to seeing how this series develops.

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You might also like Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

African-American, Fiction, Novella, Science Fiction

Binti: The Night Masquerade

January 25, 2018January 25, 2018 Shay Shortt

by Nnedi Okorafor

ISBN 978-0-7653-9312-8

“Binti was change, she was revolution, she was heroism.”

In the third volume of her novella trilogy, Nnedi Okorafor continues the story of Binti, who has returned home to Earth after her first year of study at the galaxy’s premier institution of higher education, Oomza Uni. While the homecoming and reckoning with her family and her heritage was difficult, Binti is now faced with an even larger conflict. The peace between the Meduse and the Khoush is tentative, bound to break at any moment, and the Himba may be caught in the middle. Still struggling to control the zinariya biotechnology that she unlocked in Home, and suffering from the side effects, Binti may nevertheless be called to put her skills as a master harmonizer to work on one of the oldest feuds in the galaxy.

As evidenced by the summary above, the plot of this novella relies heavily on the action and world-building of previous installments—reading out of order is not advised. While Binti and Home have a logical separation, The Night Masquerade reads as a continuation of Home, but on an expanded thematic scale. In Home, Binti was forced to confront the rift that she made when she left her family and abandoned their traditions to attend Oomza Uni. She also had to do some grappling with her identity as a Himba woman, and with how her father’s heritage figured into that. The Night Masquerade expands to consider the conflict between cultures, and Binti’s place within the wider society she has entered, and indeed within the galaxy itself.

In the first volume, Binti describes her people, saying “we Himba don’t travel. We stay put. Our ancestral land is life; move away from it and you diminish.” By this third installment, it becomes evident how much Binti has grown from her experience at Oomza Uni, rather than diminished. First she connects with the Meduse, and we see how that changes her, helping her to understand anger, and realize how difficult it is to contend with. She grapples with her father’s roots among the Enyi Zinariya, learning to see them as they see themselves, rather than as the savage Desert People she has been taught to regard them as. And she makes other, new connections in The Night Masquerade. Her journey has been an expansive one that grapples with identity and belonging on many levels.

In my review of Binti in 2016, I wrote that the plot relied “heavily on a mysterious, ancient device called an edan, which serves multiple functions with little explanation.” The edan has since diminished significantly in importance to the story, but in The Night Masquerade, its origin and purpose are finally revealed, filling out the universe’s backstory. Indeed, since this is the last contracted Binti story, many things are being wrapped up and concluded. There remains ample space for Okorafor to expand on Binti’s universe, but readers will be left with a satisfying stopping place.

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Also by Nnedi Okorafor:

Who Fears Death

African-American, Canadian, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Read Diverse 2017, Read My Own Damn Books, Young Adult

Fall 2017 Fiction Mini-Reviews

November 21, 2017November 16, 2017 Shay Shortt

Hey there, stranger! Yes, I know, it’s been a while. After a busy summer of travel, at the beginning of September my husband and I started the process of buying our first home. We took possession at the end of October, and moved in November 1. It was a big change that has pretty much consumed my life for the last several months! I didn’t read as much as usual, and my writing time was eaten up by packing, packing, and more packing. Then the packing become unpacking, and things are slowly starting to get back to normal. Here are a few mini-reviews of some of what I read while I was away.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

by E.K. Johnston

ISBN 9781101994580

This YA novel is a loose modern retelling of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Hermione Winters and her best friend Polly are newly elected co-captains of the Palermo Heights cheer leading team, heading into their senior year, and their final summer cheer camp at Camp Manitouwabing. But all of their plans for the summer are thrown off course when Herimione is drugged, raped, and left in the lake. The book is an interesting and deliberate divergence from the commonly experienced reality of many rape victims, in that Hermione enjoys a supportive family, and is helped by police and counselors. However, she faces controversy in the community, and the wrath of her ex-boyfriend, Leo, who blames her for what happened. Although the identity of Hermione’s assailant is unknown, this is not really a who-dunnit. Rather, it is an emotional chronicle of the consequences of rape, further magnified by the fact that anytime Hermione encounters a boy who was at camp, she must face the idea that he could be her rapist. The biggest standout of this book is the strong female friendship depicted between Hermione and Polly, who echoes Shakespeare’s Paulina.

Love and Other Consolation Prizes

by Jamie Ford

ISBN 9780525492580

This is Ford’s third historical novel, this time set in Seattle during the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition. Ford opens on the better remembered 1962 fair, and uses it to echo and reflect the main action of 1909. The plot was inspired by a fascinating newspaper clipping from the AYP Expo, advertising the fact that an orphan boy was one of the raffle prizes at the fair. The fate of the real boy is unknown, but in his novel, Ford imagines what might have become of a young half-Chinese boy named Ernest, whose winning ticket is sold to the madam of an infamous brothel. Raised in a Catholic orphanage, Ernest comes to the red light district as the temperance movement is surging in the city, and finds himself caught between the Japanese house girl, Fahn, and Madam Flora’s stubborn daughter, Maisie. As usual with Jamie Ford, I was most fascinated by the carefully incorporated local history. This seems to be his passion, and I often wonder what would happen if he tried his hand at non-fiction. (Disclaimer: I received access to an Advance Reader’s Copy of this book through the library where I work.)

The Turner House

by Angela Fluornoy

ISBN 9780544705166

Fluornoy’s debut novel is a complex family tale that follows how the thirteen Turner siblings must grapple with what to do with the house on Yarrow Street where they grew up after their mother is too old to live alone any longer. Fluornoy focuses on the oldest sibling, Charles, aka Cha-Cha, and the youngest, Lela, separated by more than twenty-three years in age, and eleven siblings. Cha-Cha is in therapy after having claimed to have seen a ghost, and Lela is struggling mightily to hide a gambling addiction. Flashbacks illuminate the history of their parents, Francis and Viola Turner, who came North to Detroit for the promise of a better life than the one the South offered its black citizens. Thematically, the book deals broadly with place, both the importance of the Turner family home, and the history that resides there, and also the city of Detroit. Fluornoy also addresses the legacy of addiction within and between generations of a family, and how families understand mental health and addiction more generally. The plot is slow moving, but the highlight is the complex family dynamic amongst the many siblings.

African-American, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Read Diverse 2017, Read My Own Damn Books

Homegoing

October 5, 2017October 5, 2017 Shay Shortt

by Yaa Gyasi

ISBN 97811019947142

“You are not your mother’s first daughter. There was one before you. And in my village we have a saying about separated sisters. They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.”

Effia and Esi are half-sisters who have never met. First divided by their mother’s secrets, they will soon be divided by an ocean when Esi is sold into slavery and shipped across the Atlantic. Effia remains in Ghana, sold in marriage by her step-mother to the British governor of the Cape Coast Castle, where slaves are held in cramped dungeons before being loaded onto ships bound for America. In present day America, Marjorie wrestles with her identity as a Ghanaian immigrant to the United States, while Marcus struggles to complete his PhD knowing that many young black men of his generation are dead or in jail, and that only chance has kept him from the same fate. In a sweeping family saga, Yaa Gyasi follows the sisters’ bloodlines over hundreds of years, one child from each generation, tracing the impact of colonialism and slavery across the centuries, between Ghana and America.

Homegoing opens in what is now Ghana in the mid-1700s, and concludes in America in the present day. Extremely ambitious in scope, it employs an unusual structure that alternates between the two bloodlines, with a new narrator for each generation, meaning that Homegoing has a total of fourteen point of view characters. This requires the reader to settle into a new perspective every twenty or thirty minutes. However, two factors keep this structure working. First is seeking the connection back to the previous story, to find out what has become of the mother or father since we left them behind. And next is looking ahead for the new character’s romantic interest, a necessity in order for the family tree structure of the novel to function, making every chapter a love story in its own way. The chapters are not quite short stories, though each has a distinct narrative arc. But the full function of the novel comes in the layering and juxtaposition of each subsequent piece, until they are all taken together.

I was personally most drawn into the chapters set in Africa, perhaps because the story was less familiar. The American side of the story traces the family from plantations to convict leasing to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights era, and through the modern day, history that I have at least a decent grasp on. I knew much less about tribal conflict between the Asante and Fante, and how the British exploited it to fuel the slave trade. Another fascinating chapter, featuring Effia’s great-granddaughter, Abena, recounts the introduction of cocoa farming in Ghana. It remains one of Ghana’s chief agricultural exports to this day. However, the chapter that gave me the biggest emotional punch in the gut was about Kojo—Esi’s grandson—and his wife, Anna, who are living free in Baltimore when the Fugitive Slave Act is introduced in 1850.

Homegoing is a multigenerational epic that walks the fine line between hope, anger, and despair as the tales of Esi and Effia’s descendants unspool. Each chapter is a slice of life set against the background of a particular historical era, be it the Great Migration or the War of the Golden Stool. The full effect of the novel is such that in the end, the reader knows more about Marcus and Marjorie’s families than they do, the fall out of slavery and colonialism depriving them of their history and culture. The book is a potent reminder that the history is always there, just beneath the surface, and that the story has always been waiting to be told, though the voice of the victors has long drowned it out.

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You might also like The Illegal by Lawrence Hill

African-American, Fiction, Graphic Novel, History, Memoir, Read Diverse 2017

March: Book Three

June 29, 2017June 29, 2017 Shay Shortt

by John Lewis and Andrew Ayden

Art by Nate Powell

ISBN 978-1-60309-402-3

“For so many months I’d kept my emotions bottled up to be strong for those counting on me to lead, but there I was alone in the dark with it all.”

Politician and civil rights leader John Lewis has been representing Georgia’s fifth congressional district for the past three decades. Before that, he enjoyed a long career as a civil rights activist and organizer, and served on the city council in Atlanta. The script for the March graphic novel was written with his congressional aide, Andrew Aydin, who wanted to capture some of the memories Lewis had shared with him in their time working together. This is the third and final volume in the trilogy. Catch up with March: Book One and March: Book Two here.

March: Book Three opens where March: Book Two left off, with the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. The third volume is by far the longest in the trilogy, and has the most ground to cover, not necessarily in terms of time, but in terms of significant events in the civil rights movement, when participation and media attention gained critical mass. This installment includes the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Malcom X, the Freedom Summer voter registration project, the Selma march, and the passage of the Civil Rights Bill and the Voting Rights Act. The frame narrative that anchored the first volume has mostly slipped away, with only occasional references back to the inauguration of Barack Obama. It concludes on a meta note, with Lewis and Aydin discussing the idea of turning Lewis’ memoirs into a comic book.

Book three continues to chronicle the violence faced by peaceful protestors, particularly in Mississippi and Alabama as the civil rights movement gained steam. Scene after scene shows demonstrators beaten by police, or police standing by while they are attacked by white supremacists. Volunteers knew they might face violence when they signed up to register black voters in the South, but no one expected three volunteers to be intercepted and murdered before the Freedom Summer even began. Nate Powell’s black and white art chillingly depicts dredging the Mississippi swamps in search of the bodies of the three missing young men. Over and over, it shows the terrible price paid to bring in the Civil Rights Bill and the Voting Rights Act.

In addition to teaching the history of the civil rights movement, Lewis also provides a behind the scenes perspective on the growing pains of a swelling movement, and the ideological differences that arose. He highlights disagreements about the role of white people in the movement, and the role of gender equality as more women began participating. Different organizations often had profoundly different ideas about how to approach their advocacy, which Lewis presents in a diplomatic fashion. We also see Lewis beginning to move in powerful circles, not just the leadership of the student movement, but also among other civil rights organizations, and even meeting the president. This might be a little inside baseball for some readers, but it does drive home the amount of behind the scenes work and debate involved in bringing about change.

Throughout March, Lewis emphasizes action over legislation, highlight the fact that while laws are important, they mean nothing without practical enforcement or compliance. Even as it concludes at a triumphal moment, with the inauguration of the United States’ first black president, there is a note of sadness and caution. One of the last scenes depicts Lewis listening to his voicemail. “I was thinking about the years of work, the bloodshed…the people who didn’t live to see this day,” Ted Kennedy says as Lewis listens in the dark, head in his hands. March is dedicated to “the past and future children of the movement.” And the next day, Congressman Lewis is back at his office, planning to educate those future children about what was lost, what was gained, and the work yet to be done.

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You might also like The Outside Circle by Patti Laboucane-Benson

African-American, Fiction, LGBTQIA+, Read Diverse 2017, Speculative Fiction

The Prey of the Gods

June 27, 2017June 27, 2017 Shay Shortt

by Nicky Drayden

ISBN 9780062493033

Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of this title from the publisher through the Harper Voyager Super Reader Program.

“If there’s one rule in planning for world domination, it’s to make sure you look good doing so.”

South Africa, 2064. Sydney, a debased demi-goddess with dwindling powers, schemes to find enough fear, blood, and belief to feed on to return to her heyday. A new designer drug is hitting the market, and unleashing the divine potential of seemingly ordinary humans, and in it Sydney sees the possibility of chaos such as the world has not experienced for a long time. Meanwhile, her old mentor Mr. Tau is preparing to release a new demi-goddess into the world, one who may help her or undermine her, depending on how Sydney plays her cards. Can a pop star, two gay teens, a little girl, a politician, and a robot foil her plans?

To be honest, it is hard to give a concise, non-spoilery plot summary of The Prey of the Gods. There are at least eight point of view characters, and a lot of seemingly disparate elements that have to come together in this unusual novel. The book has elements of both fantasy and science fiction, as well as a distinct sense of humour. Sydney is a demigoddess, and mythology forms the underpinning of the story, but it is science that unleashes the action. The new drug hitting the market seems like a hallucinogen, but is really tapping into the divine potential of humans, including powers such as mind reading and manipulation that will create unprecedented chaos as they spread through the population. Meanwhile, the ubiquitous personal robots belonging to the human cast are gaining sentience, and questioning their role in society.

Perhaps the book’s strongest feature is its diverse and interesting cast of characters. I was particularly drawn to Nomvula, the young Zulu girl, and Councilman Stoker, the cross-dressing politician with a secret life as a drag performer who is starting to realize that he just might be trans. Drayden has also created an interesting character in Riya Natrajan, a fairly unlikeable pop diva who has been faking a drug problem to hide a more serious chronic medical condition from the public. Additional points of view come from Muzi, who is struggling with a crush on his best friend, Elkin, and This Instance, later named Clever 4-1, Muzi’s newly sentient personal robot. The mix of characters is exactly as odd and intriguing as you would expect, but works well once the reader gets everyone straight, and especially after the narratives begin to overlap.

Part of what gives nuance to the large cast is the theme of family, which is important for each character in different ways. When the book opens, Muzi is about to be circumcised not because he wants to, but because he knows that going through this traditional rite of passage will please his grandfather, whose approval he craves. Much of Riya’s backstory is defined by her mother’s death, and the complications that ensued in her relationship with her father, who she has not spoken to in years. Nomvula has grown up before her time caring for her sickly mother, with no father or siblings. When Mr. Tau and Sydney come along, her desire for family connections will change everything. Councilman Wallace Stoker is less interested in politics than music, but pressure to continue the familial political legacy keeps him from pursuing his dreams, or realizing his true identity. His domineering mother has her eye on the premier’s office, and will let nothing get in the way of her son achieving that landmark.

The Prey of the Gods is a humourous, genre bending romp through the near future, fearlessly mixing and matching demi-goddesses and robots, pop stars and politicians. Although it takes a while to settle in and get a handle on all the moving pieces of this narrative, the result is fresh and unexpected.

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You might also like Company Town by Madeline Ashby