Binti: The Night Masquerade

The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


By the third entry in this series I think I finally got my head around it, and the other two books became more enjoyable on reflection. Binti's world and story are completely different from other alien/space travel stories, even though they intersect in a lot of places. Living ships and hard-to-understand aliens are standard stuff. But seen through the Himba cultural lens (as told by a writer of Igbo descent) the emphasis changes--things that might seem important to us careful readers elsewhere (lots of dangling plot points--(view spoiler)[Why did the Meduse and Khoush start shooting again after Binti had done "magic" to bring about peace? If magic fails there's supposed to be a reason. It felt like a dangling plot point (hide spoiler)]) might not be so important. Phones are bespoke and intimately tuned to their users (this feels a bit dated, in that it is happening now).

I felt like this series was more disjointed than the other book I read by Okorafor, Who Fears Death. The world in that book was like Binti's, and challenged the reader, but it all made sense. Still, the persistence paid off and I ended up enjoying it.





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Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This book reads like you took an armload of glam rock albums, put them in a blender, covered them with chocolate sauce and set them on fire. It has all the nuance of a trash compactor, all the character development of an overripe mango, and all the wonder of a six year old..cat. Reading this, I felt like I had run several miles in a three piece suit, sat in a hot tub, gone break dancing, and then sat in the sun for several hours.

Just about no effort to turn out the above, and that's the whole book. I have no doubt that the author crafted these sentences herself, but it reads like it could have been written by a neural network from the 90's. There's a wafer-thin plot, and a touch of character development, in a sea of overdone metaphors and similes pretending to be clever. Not sure how this gets all the award nominations, since there's just not that much there. I saw it through to the end, but was glad it got there. Exhausting to read, and not much in the way of payoff.



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