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) ) 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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