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. 

--

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

Nanoreviews: Goliath, All the Horses of Iceland, The Ones We're Meant to Find

Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi [Tordotcom Publishing, 2022]

Let's not mess around here: Goliath is one of the most impressive works of science fiction I've ever read. Tochi Onyebuchi's novel bills itself as "a primal biblical epic flung into the future", and it certainly delivers on that sense of both scale and mythology: a mosaic novel set in New Haven, Connecticut, centred on the lives of those left on a radioactive, oxygen deprived Earth by a space colonisation movement that was only ever accessible to the elite, the shifting dynamics as some of the spacefarers begin to return, and the damage that this gentrification causes to communities who have only ever tried to build a safe, comfortable life for themselves. Within that broad framework, Onyebuchi populates his narrative with a range of perspectives and characters, taking us through a meticulous, non-linear journey through their lives and concerns. At the heart of it are two groups, given equally sympathetic portrayals despite their very different positions. There's the young gay couple, Jonathan and David, who are returning from space and whose perspectives are portrayed as sympathetically as any others, albeit with an eye to showing how much their perspectives differ from those already living in the neighbourhood that they consider a blank slate opportunity (in the opening paragraph, Jonathan talks about the warnings he receives about "gangs" who populate Earth, before dismissing them in favour of his enthusiasm for the "shadow country" that is his vision of the planet). And then there's Linc, Bishop and their crew of demolitionists, whose job is to tear down houses (using a very cool bit of futuristic technology with potential for grim malfunctions that are quickly demonstrated) and then stack the bricks left behind so that they can be transported to the colonies. It's through the eyes of Linc and his buddies that we really come to grips with the extent to which the world has been broken, and the inescapably racist dynamics of who suffers from it. The group's banter swings from wild second-hand stories about former house parties to furious deconstructions of their political reality, and it's their reactions which sets the tone for the rest of the novel's politics.

There's no grand showdown or dramatic set pieces in Goliath: Jonathan and David's lives briefly intersect with Bishop, but not in any way that changes the course of the future history we are watching. Instead, Goliath just concerns itself with setting out that history: built, as the acknowledgements demonstrate, from a deep understanding of the dynamics of our recent past and extrapolating them into an era of space travel. The result is a very particular kind of novel: one which demands a lot of attention while reading and isn't in the business of giving instant narrative gratification, but which takes a sledgehammer to a lot of genre assumptions about near future science fiction, including how the sexy, exciting bits of those future get distributed and whose stories we consider worth telling because of that. I expect I'll be evaluating every book set in this narrative space against Goliath for the rest of my days, and I can't think of any better sign of quality than that.

All the Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie [Tordotcom Publishing, 2022]

From a speculative future history to a speculative history-history, Sarah Tolmie's new Tor dot com novella tells the story of Eyvind of Eyri, an 8th century Icelandic trader who travels through central Asia and into Mongolia to bring a herd of horses back to his homeland, including a mare whose supernatural origins have a far-ranging impact on the future of Icelandic horse genes. Except, the story isn't really about Icelandic horse breeding, so let's set all of that aside until it gets explained in the epilogue. It's Eyvind's story, and there is also a really cool horse. Right. 

Immediate bonus points must be awarded for the fact that I'm in a real mood for travelogue stories at the moment, and Tolmie's is a great example of the form, with Eyvind chronicling the adventure with his fellow travellers - most of whom are from the historic trading empire of Khazaria, through which Eyvind travels on his way to Mongolia - and the customs and concerns of the places he passes through, especially during his time in Mongolia where he successfully barters for his herd of horses and takes on responsibility for a white mare who everyone else claims not to see. Tolmie has a fantastic literary style, switching between language that reflects the myth being created here and the supernatural origins of Eyvind's mare, and more down-to-earth descriptions of the journey itself. 

Because it's a travelogue, the challenges along the way end up being very episodic - and, in fact, there's not much in the way of external challenge here at all, beyond a sequence towards the end (where, it turns out, having a supernatural mare comes in very handy). Instead, the tension is built up through watching a man travelling far beyond the boundaries of his own world to do something new, and the way the novella's mythmaking turns that novelty into something of foundational importance for his people. This is a short and delightful read, and well worth a look.

The Ones We're Meant to Find by Joan He [Roaring Brook Press, 2021]

It feels a bit unfair covering another near future climate change-y book in the same review set as Goliath - and it definitely felt a bit unfair to read this after having my expectations affected by Goliath -  but Joan He's young adult science fiction sets out to do quite different things with its story, and it very solidly achieves those aims. The Ones We're Meant to Find tells two intertwining stories about sisters who are heavily implied (but not outright stated) to be looking for each other: there's Cee, who has been trapped alone on a desert island for three years, with amnesia clouding everything about her former life except the fact that she needs to escape and find her sister Kay; and then there's Kasey Mizuhara, who lives in a carefully designed eco-city designed to protect humanity from natural disasters while minimising their carbon output to the smallest possible amount, and is searching for her sister Celia who went missing at sea three months ago. 

As Cee struggles with survival, Kasey pushes against her own limitations and restrictions to retrace her sister's steps and understand why she chose to leave on a journey that everyone else assumes would have killed her. Along the way, resonances start to appear between the two stories: names turn up in Kasey's city which Cee independently uses to name things on her island, even as the circumstances that each is living under seem to get further and further apart. Frankly, for a long time I was ready to give up on Kasey and Cee's worlds ever colliding, and things with Cee get particularly slow and annoying at points (although she does get to meet a nice boy, who also has amnesia, and this is not baffling at all). But it does come together, and it's a reveal that's worth waiting for: one which contextualises and builds off both characters' struggles and personalities, and it leaves us with a powerful dilemma to work through at its closure. While it has its ups and downs, The Ones We're Meant to Find was ultimately a story I'm glad I spent time on.

Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy

Adri and Joe Read the Hugos: Novella

Joe: It both feels both weird and a relief not to be writing up another edition of Reading the Hugos, a series that I had been doing under various names for more than ten years, longer than I’ve been at Nerds of a Feather - but I am so very happy to join you for the first of our Hugo chats this year.

Adri: I feel weird because Hugo season doesn’t even feel like it’s started up yet, but we’re practically in the middle of September and the Nebulas have already been announced AND awarded. I have a bunch of fiction to read and I’ve still only watched one movie - and I’ve got several games to go too.

Joe: If this was a “normal” year, we’d be arguing about the winners and crunching the numbers! It’s refreshing, in a way, to not feel stressed about trying to get everything in before voting closes - but also weirdly for me I’ve read a LOT of the finalists - like, I don’t have work to do in Series because I’m pretty much done with the category. I just finished Novel when I got to Black Sun after letting it taunt my from the bedside table for months - and I have thoughts about the Nebulas. But we’re not here to talk about Series or Novel today (or the fact that I’m mainlining She-Ra right now) - let’s talk about the first category we both finished: Novella.

Adri: Novella! A nice category. A friendly category. A topical category, seeing as how we’re doing a Novella Initiative right now. And this year: a Tor.com category.

Joe: It’s a very Tor.com category. That’s been a rapidly growing trend since 2016 when Binti and The Builders were on the ballot after the imprint’s first year and they’ve dominated the category ever since, though this is the first year they’ve taken all six slots on the ballot.

Adri: Given the imprint’s track record, an all-Tor.com category has felt like a possibility for a while, but it is interesting to see it actually play out. I feel a bit bad for the fact that the publisher is getting attention over the works, and of course we will be getting on to the MAIN EVENT very soon, but I do think it’s worth digging into a bit before we start.

There's this oft-repeated comment about the trajectory of shorter fiction categories, that people aren't reading the good work in print magazines any more and that they therefore can't compete with free online work. There's supporting evidence for this in shorter categories (although whether that's really what's happening is a question I don't really want to dive into) but it completely falls apart when you look at novella, especially the strength of Tor.com not just this year but in previous years as well.

Four of the six novellas on this ballot are only physically available in hardback - with both their physical and ebook price points set accordingly - while Finna and

The Empress of Salt and Fortune were paperback releases. That's a pretty significant financial investment if you're buying all six, especially if you prefer not to read on an e-reader. Luckily, Macmillan have stopped their awful policies restricting ebooks for libraries, but not everyone has access to a library that sees SFF novellas as a worthy investment. And, sure, there's a pretty solid overlap between Hugo voters and the kind of people that get ARCs, that also only goes so far in explaining why they are dominant here. In short: Tor.com is getting fans to buy their novellas, at comparable (sometimes higher) prices than one would pay for a novel.

I'm not raising this to suggest that Tor.com is pricing its novellas too high - we don't pay for books by the word, after all. But it does demonstrate that the makeup of the ballot isn't really based on financial accessibility, or people being unwilling to pay for shorter fiction. Tor.com is successfully picking up recognition for novellas it has put its marketing budget and resources behind (and the ratio of hardcovers here suggests the ones getting nominated are the ones getting more of that budget), and while they have never been the only game in town for standalone novella publishing, they're the ones with the most publicity.

Joe: You know, I’ve never quite thought about it like that - though I’ve also bought into the online accessibility argument and you’re right, it doesn’t play with Novella. Now, I’m fortunate, my library system is awesome and they get everything from Tor.com Publishing and there are benefits of accessibility just by the nature of what we do here - but yeah, Novella belies that whole argument.

So - likely, it’s an issue of promotion combined with who is actually nominating and those nominators are not reading Asimov’s and Analog and F&SF as much as they are reading Tor.com and Uncanny. There’s a shift.

And even though we could go on a bit, let’s talk about the actual finalists because they’re pretty great!

I haven’t quite put together my ballot order yet, but I’d like to start by talking about Finna because I did *not* see that story coming and I really liked this one.

Adri: An excellent place to start! Finna can be summarised as “what if Ikea really did have extra dimensions” (a feeling that anyone who has actually walked around an Ikea store will relate to) and it’s got an excellent blend of things going on: adventure, a giant middle finger towards capitalism and the treatment of shop workers within it, and a core relationship between two people who used to be romantically involved and are now right in the middle of breaking-up emotions.

Joe: Frankly, Ikea scares me. They’ve got some good stuff, but I feel an immense pressure and stress every time I go in one. I feel trapped. And there is a sense of being trapped in Finna, what with those extra dimensions - but reading it is absolutely refreshing.

Despite their in-universe breakup, the relationship is great and the writing is just so clean and on point and it’s a damned delight. It’s just a delight wrapped in an Ikea-esque hellscape.

My favorite novella on the ballot, or maybe the one that impressed me the most - if that’s a distinction that matters - is Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune.

Adri: This is one that I also adored and which gave me really strong emotions, although my memory of reading it for the first time is less strong than others on this ballot. It’s a story of empire and political struggle, but it’s told from the margins, by an aging handmaid recounting the challenges of her mistress and lover as she attempts to secure power rather than being dismissed and forgotten in a patriarchal structure.

Shorter fiction is a fantastic way for telling stories from “quieter” perspectives in a way that novel-length stories rarely seem to capture (with exceptions, like Laurie J. Marks’ Elemental Logic series) and this is a really fantastic example of that kind of story working at exactly the length intended.

Let’s move on to some of the distinctly-not-quiet works on here. Both Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi and Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark take on racial injustice and Black experience in the USA, though in quite different ways: Ring Shout as an alternate history that puts the Klu Klux Klan at the centre of a sorcerous plot to destroy humanity, and Riot Baby as a contemporary/near future take on injustice with a use of magic that really heightens the tension.

Joe: Riot Baby was excellent, but I felt absolutely inadequate to discuss it (though Sean Dowie was more than ably up to the task in his review) and I believe that’s tied to how Onyebuchi is examining race in America and the underlying anger seething through the story. It’s tough. It’s tough to deal with. It’s supposed to be tough to deal with, especially for upper middle class white folks who seldom have to deal with or engage with things that other people have no choice but to live with every moment of their lives.

Ring Shout isn’t necessarily any less angry, but it’s somewhat more accessible. There’s more “action” and “adventure” even while the women are fighting off the Ku Kluxes, demons made manifest.

Adri: I agree with this. Riot Baby is a challenge of a book, one that I really appreciated reading and that I think does exactly what it sets out to do, but I find it harder to unpack how it achieves what it does than I do with other works. I’m aware that that’s mostly about the limitations of my experience, not the book's quality, but still. There it is.

I find Ring Shout’s historical adventure setting really compelling (even if it’s grim as fuck and nowhere near as speculative as we might want it to be - real Klu Klux Klan members aren’t literal possessed demons but… well) and while it doesn’t pull its punches, there’s also something quite satisfying about the way the action plays out, even with the human cost.

Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey, is a future dystopia rather than a historical but I want to draw the parallel because I think they share a bit of DNA in how they take a very American setting and bring out the worst elements of prejudice and discrimination within it. In Gailey’s novella, the pain point is gender and sexuality, rather than race, in a Western setting where respectable women are allowed to be travelling librarians, and it turns out that actually they aren’t respectable in the way society expects them to be at all.

Joe: I read Upright Women Wanted so long ago that even knowing that it’s on this ballot I keep forgetting it was a 2020 publication. With that said, Upright Women Wanted was a pretty rad book - to the point that my wife (not a big SFF reader) recommended it to a number of people. Solid recommendation.

Adri: I also like Upright Women Wanted a lot, although it gets a bit lost among the competition for me. I also know people with mixed feelings about its portrayal of gender: there’s a character who goes by they/them pronouns but appears to pass in civilisation with “she/her”, and there’s not much exploration of dysphoria or even a concrete explanation that it is about passing and not just someone who uses both pronouns (side note, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with a character who properly uses multiple pronouns and I think it’s overdue!) Still, Upright Women Wanted is now the book I think about when I consider whether SFF still has room for gender dystopias, and the answer is yes.

Joe: The last novella we haven’t talked about was Come Tumbling Down and listen, it’s Seanan McGuire and she doesn’t miss. If you’re in on this series, you’re going to love revisiting Jack and Jill and you know what’s up. If you’re not, there is a barrier to entry. McGuire generally does a good job setting the stage for new readers but even so, this is NOT for new readers and that’s fine but you really need to have read somewhere between one and three of the previous novellas for this one to really land - which is fine, we do series work with the Hugos but how Come Tumbling Down holds up really depends on your experience with the series. I was all in from the first page of Every Heart a Doorway (a previous Hugo winner in this category) so this is a book for me.

Adri: Alas, here’s where we come into conflict, because after a solid-to-strong four books in the Wayward Children series, Come Tumbling Down frustrated the heck out of me. The lessons felt contrived, the characters didn’t land at all (even the returning ones) and for a novella set in a world of gothic peril, everyone sure did get away without any significant (i.e. permadeath) consequences. I know that some of those consequences are set to play out in later books, as next year's release is about one of the characters who has an Encounter in Come Tumbling Down, where the fallout isn't dealt with. But as an individual story, this was a serious letdown for me - especially because, as you say, Seanan McGuire is not normally an author to miss the mark.

Now we’ve been through the list, we have to get to that all important but all-painful ratings. What’s up there on your list?

Joe: My top three are The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Ring Shout, and Finna - in that order. Notwithstanding our slight disagreement on the McGuire, there’s not really a weak novella on this ballot - but I *really* like the top of my ballot. Those three novellas are something special. What do you have?

Adri: My top three are the same as yours! In another excellent year for novellas, Finna, Ring Shout and The Empress of Salt and Fortune all stand out as exemplars of the genre, and it’s Nghi Vo’s quiet but powerful storytelling that wins the day. Still, I’d cheer loudly for a win for any of these three, and I wouldn’t be truly unhappy with any of the others (even Come Tumbling Down) either.

Joe: Excellent! I think we both have great taste!

I think that’s a wrap for novellas. Next Time: Novels!

Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 5x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him

Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy

Microreview [Book]: Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

 A story with instructive, powerful, and necessary anger.

Oppression can be physical, but it’s often more than that. America has subjugated Black bodies for a long time—first with blatant slavery, and then with figurative, rather than literal shackles that has the insidious ability of being intergenerational. Disadvantages are established at birth, and the steps to get out of them are elusive, as ordained by the social system. In Riot Baby, a character is inserted with a gadget that monitors and controls them. But it’s also a significant metaphor for how incarceration, social disadvantages, and life with seemingly no escape route is embedded into many Black bodies. Not because they’re whipped and denied voting rights, but because America’s system has a way of finagling itself to mostly keep the status quo, while giving an illusion of exaggerated racial progress. It’s a system that should draw a lot of anger. And in Riot Baby, it does just that. Anger is suffused in this novella, both in characters and themes, giving even its meandering sections raging energy.

In America, Ella is a girl gifted with magical abilities that allow her to levitate, see the future, enter people’s minds, and much more. She mostly interacts with her family or secludes herself. She is Black. So is her younger brother Kev, who is incarcerated outrageously for being a young Black man. From there, the story explores American history, tragedies, and its deeply wrongful consequences and insistence, all within a novella that spans decades, many locations, while never really losing grasp of its narrative.

Kev is a tremendously fully drawn character. His sorrow, pain, moments of camaraderie, and anger, are all developed in ways that deliver a full-forced punch and are conducive to the narrative. Riot Baby has some of the best dialogue I’ve read in quite a while – both punchy and natural – and most of that dialogical brilliance is in Kev’s sections. Meanwhile, Ella could’ve solely been a mouthpiece for the book’s themes, but she’s so much more than that. Her semi-solitary/introspective journey might be more thematic, while Kev’s interaction with many people lends itself more to characterization, but Onyebuchi infuses Ella’s thematic exploration with otherworldliness, giving the themes a sense of magic, albeit an often upsetting and infuriating one.

Riot Baby flows quite well, but not completely smoothly. The story starts out very strong, has a mid-section with both emotionally cutting and meanderingly adrift sections, making me always appreciate Onyebuchi’s craft, but wondering if he had a solid plan of wrapping the story up. The parts I found meandering became worth it and increased in my estimation retrospectively because its conclusion is absolutely gorgeous, as the anger that had gradually built up erupted in something that absolutely befits what came before. I just wish the story could’ve made its lesser bits golden during my reading rather than after.

America might embed oppression into Black bodies, but as Riot Baby shows, it's not the only thing that seeps intergenerationally. Every day there’s a new racial tragedy, but every day there is also dignity and courage. Because oppression doesn’t make most people huddle away and let it eat away at them. There’s a fire that existed before, existed now, and will exist into the future. That fire has become stronger than ever before, and throughout all the terror, there’s hope that it will scorch wickedness and injustices. That feat within the American climate might seem daunting, but it’s possible. It’s not a fantasy, but it is magic. 

 The Math:

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 For a brilliant ending.
+1 For a unique, fluid writing style.

Negatives: -1 For a middle that while still worthwhile, isn't as strong as its beginning or ending.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Onyebuchi, Tochi. Riot Baby [Tordotcom, 2020].

POSTED BY: Sean Dowie - Screenwriter, editor, lover of all books that make him nod his head and say, "Neat!”