Binti (Binti #1): Book Review

• Author: Nnedi Okorafor    
• First Published: 2015    
• Genre: Science Fiction    
• Rating: ★★☆    

Have you ever had the urge to just up and leave it all behind? Your people. Your culture. Your family. Your planet. Binti did, despite it going against the grain of everything she knew and cherished, in the pursuit of higher education.

The premise of this novella is fantastic! A young woman from a technologically advanced, yet relatively reclusive and superstitious people, is the first of her people to leave Earth, motivated by the opportunity to study at a prestigious school, all-expenses paid, in the Milky Way galaxy. Despite her family and friends having forbade her from leaving their desert and their community, she snuck off into the night, arriving in time to meet her transporter. This transporter is where her dreams and nightmares collided as disaster struck and surprising events took place.

The writing is where it lacked heavily for me. This book, to me, lacked detail, lacked cohesiveness, lacked structure, and was too repetitive, taking me out of the story multiple times. For details, I would have loved more about her people, about the sights and sounds of the new city that she's witnessing for the first time, more details about her supposed friends on the transport, and the list goes on. Instead, we receive tiny glimpses, just enough to know it exists, then we move on; for me, especially with science fiction, that's not enough to buy me in to the world. My issues with cohesion, structure, and repetition are all products of each other, making the whole novella feel chaotic and lost at times. You can tell as much too when you read the author's notes at the end where she mentions that when she felt lost about where to go next, she'd just ask her daughter what she would like to happen. To me, this whole book felt more like a draft and less of a completed work. I should mention that this isn't a bash on novellas, I've read my fair share of them that I've quite enjoyed, just that this one was lacking for me.

I'm honestly quite disappointed and sad that I feel this way about this novella as I've wanted to read it for quite some time now as it was quite popular in some of my reading groups and circles. It's possible that due to its awards and accolades, as well as people I know hyping it up, that it may have been over-hyped for me. Needless to say, I will not be continuing with this series, but I would maybe recommend it to younger readers, maybe 9-12, with the disclaimer that there is some violence in it.

Do you agree? Have you read this book before? Do you enjoy novellas?

Cheers!