Akata Witch
Apr. 16th, 2018 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearRecently, I read Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor, which tells the story of Sunny, an albino girl living in Nigeria, who discovers she is part of a hidden world of magic and has to find her place and eventually undertake a dangerous mission.
Sunny makes for a good protagonist, with whom the reader can explore and discover the world of the Leopard People, since she knows nothing going in, and has to have everything explained to her. However, I did feel as if there was a lot of exposition that didn't really clarify much, as though the author was keen to keep supplying intriguing details but not give away too much. Sunny gets very frustrated at not knowing what's going on, and I shared her frustration as a reader, trying to get to grips with this strange, new world.
It also took a very, very long time for the story to get going. I decided to give it to page 175 (halfway) to really engage me, and it finally got interesting on page 171, then waited until about 30 pages before the end for anything to really happen. It was basically half a book of setup, five pages explaining the stakes and the mission, half a book of training montage, and then ten pages of actual action, with a bit of aftermath following.
I did find the world interesting - I particularly liked how the magical money system worked, with people earning money by demonstrating that they had learned things. And I liked Sunny a lot, also growing to like the other characters in her little group by the end. I also enjoyed seeing a culture I know very little about, and experiencing a story that took place somewhere that felt very distant from me.
But it felt very much like a precursor to something much bigger and more exciting, as if most of the plot was being saved up for the second book, and I'm not sure I'm invested enough at this point to want to read on.
Sunny makes for a good protagonist, with whom the reader can explore and discover the world of the Leopard People, since she knows nothing going in, and has to have everything explained to her. However, I did feel as if there was a lot of exposition that didn't really clarify much, as though the author was keen to keep supplying intriguing details but not give away too much. Sunny gets very frustrated at not knowing what's going on, and I shared her frustration as a reader, trying to get to grips with this strange, new world.
It also took a very, very long time for the story to get going. I decided to give it to page 175 (halfway) to really engage me, and it finally got interesting on page 171, then waited until about 30 pages before the end for anything to really happen. It was basically half a book of setup, five pages explaining the stakes and the mission, half a book of training montage, and then ten pages of actual action, with a bit of aftermath following.
I did find the world interesting - I particularly liked how the magical money system worked, with people earning money by demonstrating that they had learned things. And I liked Sunny a lot, also growing to like the other characters in her little group by the end. I also enjoyed seeing a culture I know very little about, and experiencing a story that took place somewhere that felt very distant from me.
But it felt very much like a precursor to something much bigger and more exciting, as if most of the plot was being saved up for the second book, and I'm not sure I'm invested enough at this point to want to read on.
