Reviews with content warning for Body horror - The Book of Phoenix

I really like the Afro-Futurism genre. I did find this particular book to be a bit rushed, especially at the end, but it wasn’t bad. I think it was an interesting idea, but as something that was meant to explain how *The Great Book* was written, it sort of failed. Felt like a completely different story…which I understand was part of the point, but still.

Spoiler

Basically things still weren’t explained, with the frame story character already believing the Okeke were cursed before hearing the story, and then just…confirming it?

Content Warnings

bluejayreads's review against another edition

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adventurous dark reflective

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I have read several of Nnedi Okorafor’s books at this point and enjoyed almost all of them. I encountered Who Fears Death a while ago, but didn’t think it sounded all that interesting. Then I discovered this one, a prequel to Who Fears Death, and thought it did sound interesting. (My love of the Maximum Ride books in middle school means I’m still a sucker for characters grown in labs to have superhuman powers.)

It’s easy for me to fall into the temptation to compare all books like this to the Maximum Ride series – especially in this case, where our lab-grown super-powered protagonist has wings, escapes from said lab, and has people from that lab constantly chasing her. But comparing The Book of Phoenix and Maximum Ride does The Book of Phoenix a disservice. The Maximum Ride series are cool books, full of action and adventure and epic characters with wings and a little bit of romance – a perfect formula for a YA bestseller. The Book of Phoenix is darker, angrier, an africanfuturism apocalyptic sci-fi with an all-POC main cast full of love and loss, pain and death, technology and superhuman abilities and the desire to cleanse the world of people who would treat their fellow humans like objects, by fire if necessary. If you loved Maximum Ride in middle school and became a leftist when you grew up, this is the book you wish Maximum Ride could be.

Phoenix herself is amazing. She reads voraciously and loves taking in new information, but it never crosses her mind that she is a prisoner and being regularly tortured is not a fact of life but a fact of her imprisonment until Saeed dies. She tells the story in first person, narrating it to a listener (which made it an especially great read as an audiobook), and it’s a story of her personal journey. Across the Atlantic ocean twice, from sheltered and mostly-innocent to finding a home and people who accept her, to death and loss and her transformation into an agent of blazing change. As she discovers more she grows more angry and burns hotter and the book never tries to dismiss or soften her rage. The story seems to say that if Phoenix wants to cleanse the world with fire, she is right to do so.

I don’t want to say much about the plot, because Phoenix doesn’t know any of the big picture at the beginning and the plot evolves as she learns more. It’s big and twisty and feels like pulling back the layers of an onion you know is rotting inside and with each later you discover more and more rot that you expected. As the reader, I’m wise to the tropes and it didn’t do anything too far outside my expectations, but what it did do was unique enough and Phoenix was such a compelling narrator that it felt like looking at the tropes with new eyes.

These next thoughts contain spoilers.

Spoiler

The other book by Nnedi I read this year, Remote Control, also featured a glowing alien seed in a box that may or may not have granted magic powers to the protagonist and ended up planted beneath a shea tree. The two books are otherwise very different so it’s weird that they were so similar in this one plot point.
The sex scene made me a little uncomfortable. Phoenix may have the body and mind of a 40-year-old, but she’s only been alive for three years at that point. Plus she enjoys what’s happening but explicitly does not know if it was sex or not. I’m not sure where that falls in terms of informed consent but it definitely fell in my personal “I’m not entirely comfortable with this” zone.

I hadn’t originally planned to read Who Fears Death, but I think I might now. I know that book follows a completely different set of characters and is set after the events of this book, but I liked this one so much that I want to read Who Fears Death anyway.

Content Warnings

aconfundityofcrows's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Content Warnings

ejb44's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor is a Afrofuturist short novel following SpeciMEN creations in Tower 7, set (we can assume) a couple hundreds of years into the future. Sunuteel, the character who brings this story to us, is transmitted a file called The Book of Phoenix upon stumbling across a cave with computers, and we hear the story of Phoenix, a creation, and her life.

As someone who doesn’t particularly like sci-fi or fantasy, I was worried about disliking the book, particularly because I find tropes are repeated in this genre – good guys vs bad guys; intense love story; a “be all and end all” atmosphere. However, luckily for me, the author added amazing complexities to her novel, exploring themes of post-colonialism (despite independence in Africa being years ago), bodily autonomy and what it means to grow up and develop as an individual.

The best part of the book was the structure and the way the author chose to explore the story of Phoenix through this audio file. This was a really unique way to explore a story, and brings in the conversations of narration, storytelling and what counts as narration. In the world we live in, with new technologies constantly replacing the last, and the on-going (pointless) debate about whether listening to audiobooks is the same as reading books (fun fact, they are), I thought it was quite telling that Okorafor uses an audio file to explore both Phoenix’s story and allow for conversations about how media can be conveyed.

Despite this brilliance in artistry, I still found it quite difficult to connect with the characters and the overall setting because, again, I don’t like sci-fi and think the genre overall just doesn’t sit quite right with me. Even though themes and conversations woven into the novel were poignant and brilliant, it just didn’t hit me as hard as I had hoped.

To add to this, there is one part of the book where the protagonist, Phoenix, “realises” something about one of her doctors, however, she then also discovered it about 30 pages later, as if for the first time. This slight mishap in the writing did make it a little difficult to remain immersed in this post-apocalyptic fictional world, sadly.

Overall, if you’re looking for a fantasy sci-fi novel that deals with real issues, talks about the effects of colonialism and engages in meaningful dialogue about technology and the treatment of black people as objects to be tested on, then this book is brilliant. If you love Star Trek, any Lovecraft book or narratives like Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee, then this book is probably right up your street.

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