Book Review: Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi

Playing with language, tone and contrast to make something that feels familiar and new at the same time.

This is a story of juxtapositions. Tone and content and setting and expectations and language, many unexpected bedfellows rub up against one another. It's interest and success comes from how well managed those contrasts are, and how the unexpected intertwine to emphasise the meaning coming from both sides.

Harmattan Season is set in West Africa under recent French colonial rule. The main character, Boubacar, has mixed ancestry, with one foot in each of the cultures in his home city. In the past, he has fought for the French, but in the present is a down on his luck, struggling for work chercher - someone who finds people for money. When a grievously injured woman stumbles into his room one night, the police hot on her tale, he's set on a journey to discover who she is, where she came from, what happened to her, and what it could mean not just for him, but for the whole city.

That sounds familiar, right? Maybe not the specifics, but the tone, the setup. A detective, a woman with a problem, a mystery that might be more than it first seems... if your genre senses are telling you "noir", you would absolutely be right. Within even the first few sentences, the vibe is settling itself in for the long haul:

Fortune always left whatever room I walked into, which is why I don't leave my place much these days. It works pretty well; I keep my office close (downstairs, actually) for others' sake. Means that the bad-luck radius stays small. But, of course, the work suffers.

This could be any hard-boiled detective in any black-and-white office in any number of stories. Onyebuchi sets out his stall on this right from the off, and that tone never dips, not even for a second. There are familiar phrases, quirks of grammar - a lot of sentences clipped at their beginning - that put you right into exactly that framework and keep you there. Obvious, but not so over the top as to be egregious. And part of why that is is because so much of the rest of the story runs counter to that clear tone.

To start with, the setting. It's about a generation into French colonisation (given that mixed heritage adult characters exist), which puts us a bit early for the typical time period of the hardboiled detective, never mind that none of the characters are speaking English. Obviously the book is in English, but there's a frisson that comes from these very familiar US-specific linguistic flourishes in a story that takes pains to specify when different languages are spoken. Onyebuchi wants you to remember what this is - and isn't. But even if not for the time, the noir detective is typically at home in his US city, so taking him out into the world beyond is already a little unexpected. Add into that the mentions of fashion - the gendarme uniform and the djellaba - and the picture we hold in our heads is never the pinstripe suit and the brimmed hat. Again, these details of dress are constantly noted, this is another contrast being made clear.

And then of course just... the story. The typical noir detective isn't dealing with bodies who float up into the air, their blood hanging in mesmerising droplets over the city square. Nor are they reckoning with the ongoing legacy of colonialism or the difficulties of being tied to two different and opposing sides in a conflict that keeps on going.

There's a lot going on here.

And somehow... it all works. It's not just that the disparate elements are kept tightly under control, but that they are used to intersect productively. The contrast and the frisson turns into something new and better, something that reinforces the points being made on all sides, rather than just adding an unexpected twist.

Take, for example, the standard fantasy trope of the woman in danger who needs the comfort of the hard-boiled detective. The dame. Or, in a French-speaking context, the dame. It's not just a pun. Several moments like this, where the language or tropes of one side of the equations cuts through into one of the other pieces in play and you realise there's a connection going on, that there's a through-current you hadn't thought about at all. The pun, the visual cue, the little moment of knowing is just the nudge you need to get you across into the deeper well of connection that Onyebuchi is drawing from.

And there are likewise moments of disconnection, of language choices that feel deliberately set to break you out of immersion, and make you step back from the story - anachronisms like the protagonist talking about "batting average" as a metaphor for success rating (and his conversation partner not knowing what he meant), meme references like "I don't think that word means what you think it means", sitting in an alley with a little kid planning a heist - an "impossible mission" - in a scene achingly reminiscent of the movie staple. It's full of knowing winks telling you that what's being done here is, always, deliberate.

And it works. It shouldn't, but it does, because it feeds back into this being a story about contrasting culture, and a character unsure of himself and his place in his city, his role in the events unfolding.

Aside from all this linguistic playfulness, there's a depth to the thematic core of the book that is surprisingly hefty for the relatively short page count. Because so much of the heart of the story turns back to the recently ended war and the very present current legacy of the violence enacted as part of it. Whether that's the injured ex-soldier we meet in a care-home, his one glass eye unnerving the protagonist, or the upcoming election whose result may bring about a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, uncovering ghosts and literal bones many wish left undisturbed, the spectre of the past hangs close overhead. Bouba himself fought, and he too must face up, by the end of the story, to his role in what came before, and what that might mean for his future.

And the story is unflinching about facing up to that reality. By the time it becomes a pressing concern, we've spent a lot of time along the road with Boubacar, seen him being kind to street kids, bantering with beautiful women, trying to do his best for a dead woman and to remember her as a person, not just a clue. There are things to be sympathetic with in his character and his actions. But there must also be a reckoning. Can doing good in the present outweigh the sins of the past? Can there ever be closure, or forgiveness? Those are all questions asked of the story, and the character. Onyebuchi doesn't necessarily have answers tied up in a bow, but he doesn't shy away from having his protagonist face up to them. There isn't an easy answer to many of these questions. But asking them on the page makes for deeply engaging, thoughtful reading, and a story that lingers after you close the final page.

There is one aspect of the whole that doesn't quite sing as loudly as the rest of the choir, and that's the logistical nuts and bolts of the mystery plot itself. If this were just a detective story, where the only focus was on solving the crime, that might be a problem. As it stands, there were a few moments where it was a little unclear how A led to B, but I found myself willing to gloss over them because it was far from the most important or most interesting thing going on. The mystery is there to serve some of the thematic interweaving, and so I found it less critical that it be executed absolutely perfectly. It never detracted from the atmosphere, the sense of a city poised on the edge of something big, and of a character trying to find how he fits into his own life. So it was more a niggle than anything else.

All in all, it's a beautifully written story, and I love how knowingly it messes around with how its different pieces all fit together. Tonal incongruity well managed is one of my absolute favourite things in books, and Onyebuchi does it with panache, leaving a novel worth lingering over, to make sure you enjoy how every word fits into the pattern of the whole. 

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The Math

Highlights: 

• Willing to look the hard themes square in the face
• Thoughtful and unexpected use of language and genre cues to play with reader expectations
• Plot that brings great surprises without being deceitful or sneaky

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Tochi Onyebuchi, Harmattan Season, [Tor Books, 2025].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Book Review: Birth of a Dynasty: A Novel by Chinaza Bado

A rich and interesting start to an epic fantasy story that may not suit all readers.

I don’t normally put cautions or content warnings in my reviews, it's not been my general practice. But I am going to begin there, of all places, in my discussion of Birth of a Dynasty by Chinaza Bado because I think burying it would be a disservice to a reader. Birth of a Dynasty has violence and rather bad things happening to two child protagonists, ranging from death of their families to imprisonment in rather dire circumstances, violence against them directly, deadly violence committed by them, and other threats to their mental and physical well being. If that is your red line, this book may not be for you.

With that out of the way, let’s begin again as I normally would in a piece like this. Birth of a Dynasty: A Novel is an African infused and inspired location, setting and cultural matrix for a secondary fantasy world. There has been a slowly growing crop of epic fantasies with their roots in Africa, ever since I lamented their relative lack 15 or so years ago. Epic fantasies whose kingdoms, cultures, social structures are inspired by a part of world often just seen as the colonized, or the oppressed, or exoticized as a place to visit or hear stories about, rather than a power, a center of their own, worlds where African influenced cultures are the axis mundi of their secondary world. Evan Winter, Nisi Shawl, N. K. Jemisin, Marlon James and a slew of others have been exploring this space. Chiaza Bado is the latest.

Our two primary point of view characters do start as children. Let’s start with M’kuru. M’kuru is the youngest scion of the Mukundi family, a powerful and rich noble family in the kingdom. But his status starts to fall from the moment he comes onto the page. We see a vicious attack on his family and its holdings by representatives and envoys of the king. The author has taken to heart the idea of starting a novel with a “bang” as we are quickly plunged into a conflict. It is a conflict that we do not quite understand all that is going on or why, with young M’kuru in the middle of the storm.

And then his counterpart, Zikora. Like with M’kuru, Zikora is a child and the novel again does a good job of portraying a child protagonist. Like M’kuru, she lives a young and sheltered life, but is a bit of a wild child, and definitely willful. She wants nothing more than to train at arms and become a female warrior, even if she doesn’t quite understand what that means in her culture. We do get to see more of Zikora’s life, unlike M’kuru, before her own inciting incidents change her life forever.

There is a prophecy that the ruling Zenzele dynasty is worried about, that a union of scions of these two houses in particular will bring down their kingdom. In true fashion for such stories, the book opens with the Zenzele making that aforementioned vicious attack to wipe out the Mukundi entirely to prevent this from happening. If there are none left, there can be no union, and the prophecy can be averted. M’kuru, as noted above, manages to survive and escape the massacre, but not without cost, emotionally and otherwise. The problem, and it drives the plot for a good portion of the book, is that the Zenzele know that he survived, and so he lives under a cloud, unable to say who he really is, and alert for the possibility of being found out.

M’kuru finally finds a village and winds up getting shanghaied into a family of an elderly father and his daughter and living as a peasant amongst them. He gets a new identity, as Khalil, the bastard son of the daughter. There is a definite riches to rags feel to this sequence, but the intensification of a rather alarming set of events for a child continues. It’s not just a riches to rags, but a degradation of his existence.

Meanwhile, not doing everything by halves, our primary female protagonist, Zikora, is bundled off to live at the royal palace. This is a two-fold affair -- to keep a potential fulfiller of the prophecy under wraps, and also as a check against her father. Zikora’s father is even more powerful than the Mukundi were, and to do the same to them as they had to the Mukundi will require a little more leverage and preparation, But that is, judging from other points of view we get, entirely the plan of the Zenzele. And so Zikora does go to the palace, as one might go into the lion's den.

The story alternates between these two points of view, although M’kuru/Khalil's point of view gets more play and he is the more active character in some ways. And that is where I think the book misses a trick. With Zikora, inside of the royal palace, we get to see how women, in a rather strongly patriarchal society, can and do wield power and influence and manipulate events as best they can. Queens, concubines, and “guests” like our protagonist all are in a sharp competition for status and influence and these passages were, for me, some of the best in the book. They are a marked difference to M’kuru/Khalil's story and in general, I kept hoping that the story would return to Zikora more frequently than it actually did.

Both M’kuru/Khalil and Zikora grow into their roles as their paths converge toward their first meeting. There is plenty of in-palace plot in the last portion of the book, and while the book does break from our protagonists' points of view to give us information, it is here in this section that those non-protagonist point of views become crucial to the reader to piece together just what is going on.

I was thinking of Forged for Destiny by Andrew Knighton, which I read recently, since that novel deconstructs the whole idea of destiny and fate and a chosen one (or here, what seems to be indicated as the chosen couple). This novel does play it straight and shows how the winds of fate and destiny can be opposed, but never thwarted. I am not as familiar with the underlying cultures that inform and infuse this book. So for me, the Zenzele trying to stop the prophecy that will doom them has a very Greek myth sort of feel. Your child will murder your father and marry your mother, so you expose the baby on the mountainside and thus set the chain of events in motion because your child grew up ignorant of his real family. This novel is in that mold (or at least the portion of the story as far as I can tell).

And so I sit here on the tenterhooks of how I felt about the book overall. It’s well written, and has some rather vivid imagery--but some of that imagery is rather hard to take, especially when it involves children. It’s a rich and interesting world (but again, mind, it's very patriarchal in nature and there is not even a hint of anyone who is queer -- but would children raised in a society like this even know what that is or what it means?). But the genre elements, aside from being in a secondary world, are relatively slight for epic fantasy. There are a few things here and there and there is a setup for Zikora that doesn’t have much payoff in this novel, although it is clearly set for future books. It is mostly a story of prophecy, and politics and the hard road that two children undergo in the stews of both.

As far as the ending, this is the first book in a series and the narrative comes to a stop without any sort of offramp whatsoever. It’s a fraction of a larger book, not a complete story in and of itself. The protagonists have aged into teenage years by the end of the book, and so the threat of violence to children protagonists is unlikely in subsequent volumes. And there is a sense that Bado is trying for a grand sweeping epic that will take years or even longer of the lives of its protagonists to accomplish. I admire the ambition and the drive to try for it. The prophecy is not at risk of being fulfilled in a short while.

There are definitely readers that will enjoy this book and eat it up with a spoon and craving the next book. And I wanted to. But this first volume... did not leave me, alas, wanting more of the epic.

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Highlights:

• Reread the content warnings. Seriously.

• Classic fulfillment of a prophecy story.

• African-themed epic fantasy, immersively so.

• Only the start of the story.

Reference: Bado, Chinaza, Birth of a Dynasty: A Novel [Harper Voyager, 2025]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.