Reviews – Page 2 – Koba English

The Josie Gambit

Back in the summer, forces beyond my understanding compelled me to look up The Josie Gambit, a book I read in fourth grade or so. I remembered it as unsettling, with an ending that I didn’t quite get but nonetheless felt a bit grim. Maybe it was the ending that made the book stick in my head better than a lot of things I was reading at that age, who knows. But I would think about it now and again over the years, wondering if I should read it again, and finally I got the idea to check on the Internet Archive.

A note from Future Katherine!

I first wrote this post sometime in July. Just a couple of weeks before I finally hit the “schedule” button, the Internet Archive suffered a massive DDOS attack and was offline for days to fix the issue. The Internet Archive is an invaluable resource, and will probably only become more important as we stumble into an era of deepfakes and unreality. Please consider donating to support their work!

Of course, the juvenile mystery/thriller of your childhood is much less unsettling when you read it again as an adult. And honestly the jury’s out on whether this post will ever see the light of day, because discussing middle grade nostalgia reads seems like filler content.

Another note from Future Katherine! The time for filler content has come.

Our protagonist is twelve-year-old Greg, who’s spending the school year with his grandmother out in Idaho while his single mom travels for work. He’s long been friendly with the neighbor family, the Nolans, whose patriarch taught him how to play chess. Now his friend Josie Nolan is having a rough patch with her friend Tory. Things get weird and dramatic, Greg joins the school chess club, and he finally cracks the case of why Tory is acting so weird.

Reading The Josie Gambit now as an adult in 2024, it is immensely Of The 80s. Single moms! Divorce! Scandal over implied drug use! I mean just look at that cover!

But what sets it apart is Mary Francis Shura’s pitch perfect narrative voice for Greg and also the seriousness with which the book takes chess. Greg’s thinking about chess and observations of chess games is what helps him figure out why Tory is acting the way she is, and the narration is peppered with the kind of insights into chess strategy that you would expect from a preteen who was pretty serious about the game. There’s even an appendix (still written from Greg’s perspective) to explain the basic rules and mechanics.

I get now why I thought it was unsettling, but as an adult it’s not really the stuff of nightmares. A fun read if you come across it somewhere!

Miljonsvennar

Maria Bäckman’s Miljonsvennar came at the recommendation from a friend, a British national who spent his formative years in Västerås and now drops in to visit Stockholm a few times a year. Considering that he also now works in fintech, he is in every way more qualified to do my job than I am. Ah well!

Several beers after a jazz improv concert, we returned to our perennial topic of discussion: what is it to be Swedish, who counts as Swedish, are we Swedish, will I ever be free of my American accent. On the topic of the förorts he mentioned Miljonsvennar, which I immediately put a hold on at the Stockholm library.

Bäckman spent a full academic year or so observing and interviewing a class of gymnasium students (so 17- to 19- year-olds) in a less-affluent, ethnically and racially mixed suburb south of Stockholm that she anonymized as “Bergby.” What was it like, she wondered, to live in these neighborhoods as a white Swede, or at least a white Scandinavian? Over eight chapters she explores gender, religion and values, sexuality, and The Other—the more affluent suburbs and inner city of Stockholm.

Speaking in particular of The Other in this case, Miljonsvennar makes a great companion piece to Handels: Maktelitens skola. Or even more specifically, to Mikael Holmqvist’s other work, Leader Communities: The Consecration of Elites in Djursholm. There’s even a chapter in Miljonsvennar devoted to reflecting on the exchange visits between the school in Bergby and one in Djursholm. A matched pair. Bookends. Yin and yang.

Bolag Föreningar Stiftelser: En introduktion

Another niche read that I picked from the syllabus of an introductory course into business law, the same as Rätt och rättfärdigande: en tematisk introduktion i allmän rättslära.

Mostly posting here to say that I read the thing (and just in time for my authorization test, even!). It’s a brief, clear survey of the different forms of associations in Sweden, and the different laws that apply to their organization. I probably learned something, but in all honesty I should probably read it again at some point and take notes.

En man som heter Ove

I deeply resent that En man som heter Ove made me cry.

I’m inherently distrustful of media that makes me cry and my first instinct is always to take a step back and pick apart the story to see if it used any gimmicks or cheap tricks to manipulate me. (See, for example, Ali Smith’s Summer.) And while Fredrik Backman did a great job with strategically revealing the significant pieces of Ove’s backstory so that each moment hits with maximum impact, that’s good storytelling, not a cheap trick. Likewise certain story elements could have landed as overly melodramatic if the rest of the book wasn’t more or less farcical.

No, En man… hadn’t cheated to get those tears out of me. So why the resentment?

The book follows a man called Ove (quel surpris) in the weeks after being nudged into early retirement/laid off from his job. A chance accident with a car trailer and his mailbox gets him drawn into the lives of his new neighbors, and then gradually some of his older ones. In the process we flash back to the important episodes of Ove’s life up until that point, none of which I’ll go into detail here because they count as spoilers in my view. It’s not a spoiler, however, to note that the climactic point of conflict in the story is a faceoff between agents of the municipal social service authority on one side and Ove and his neighbors on the other. That’s when I had the thought: I wonder how Backman votes.

By that point in the book, it’s become clear that one of the consistent themes in the challenges Ove has faced in his life is “men in white shirts,” which function very clearly as a stand-in for the state. Which is fine and good; I’ve had my own very personal struggles with Swedish authorities and how they have either failed (from my perspective) to carry out their function or how they have enabled (again, from my perspective) individual bad actors to gatekeep access to resources that are essential for a decent quality of life.

However!

I’ve also had experiences where they (from my perspective) carried out their function, and in doing so furthered the best interests of myself or my loved ones. It has been, on the whole, a mixed bag of personal experiences.

The bag in En man… is not mixed; it’s uniformly pretty bad. Sometimes it’s a kind of bad that seems (sadly) pretty likely or reasonable, but other times it’s a kind of bad that made me raise a metaphorical eyebrow. Was it drawing from a lived experience, or was it drawing uncritically from the rumor mill about state overreach?

The biggest conflict out of all the “men in white shirts” conflicts is where a man in his 60s with pretty profound Alzheimer’s will spend the rest of his days: at home with his wife or institutionalized? For maximum drama, during this scene the Bad State Dude is present with three other assistants to (implicitly) physically overpower the elderly wife who wants to take care of her husband in their home herself. The state has a monopoly on violence, yes, yadda yadda yadda, but the intimidation here is so blatant that I had to wonder: in a real life version of this situation, is this how things would go?

(Contrast this scene with a recent story from Hem och hyra about how elderly individuals currently residing in regular apartments who apply for a spot in senior living facilities are often denied one, including people with severe dementia, Alzheimer’s, or depression. The state isn’t coming to kidnap people out of their homes but is rather refusing to let them move into one that they feel would be much more suitable.)

Backman also includes scenes with the inverse dynamics, so to speak: problems that could potentially be solved through the intervention of a state or municipal authority are instead addressed by individuals. The municipality refuses to build a wheelchair ramp at a school for one of the teachers, or to provide wheelchair adaptations for her kitchen, so Ove builds all of that himself. An abusive husband gets beaten up by Ove and another neighbor, after which the abuser just disappears out of his victim’s life forever, never to return*. After trying and failing to get problem tenants evicted, the same neighbor plants some narcotics on the property and then calls the cops. (I guess you can split that last one either way, since at the end of the day involving the police is a way of involving the state.)

*Rarely how it works out in real life situations of domestic violence!

It’s a bit like re-watching Ghostbusters with an adult’s political understanding and sensibilities: all those scenes with the suit from the Environmental Protection Agency have a tone that’s more than just comedy. Subtext and all of that.

That said, Sweden is not the US. A plot point (or recurring theme) in a novel about the uselessness, incompetence, or even malice, of municipal authorities maybe is less toxic or remarkable here because you don’t have the same years and years of toxic discourse in the culture. I’m not sure how all that works.

Therein lies the resentment, I suppose: the vague feeling that I got judo’d into agreeing with an implicit argument I wouldn’t have agreed with if it were presented more explicitly in something like an essay or opinion piece. That I had maybe fallen for a form of propaganda. The fact that I really liked the book despite myself.

Another contributing factor to the resentment for me is probably also the portrayal of Ove’s fat neighbor, Jimmy. While Ove’s fixation on the size of Jimmy’s body and constant narrative comment on it can be attributed to coming from a perspective character with certain beliefs about the world, it’s the author who chooses to portray Jimmy as constantly either eating or about to eat (and always too much, is the implication). This is presented as incidental comic relief, but it’s not particularly clever or original. None of the other secondary characters—the neighbors Ove ultimately comes to befriend—are reduced to such a flat trope, so Jimmy’s treatment feels out of place.

None of this is to be read like I think Backman has some kind of agenda with En man…, either. I emphatically do not. If he did, then the book wouldn’t have been nearly as good as it is because agendas ruin (most) books. But stories arise out of our beliefs about the world, from the grand to the banal, and there are enough recurring themes in this story that it makes me wonder if I can see the beliefs behind them. There’s even an extent to which I think I would probably agree with him in some of those beliefs. Way before I was ever wondering about Backman’s politics, I had the thought: is this the collective Swedish cultural fantasy? “This” being: wanting a friendly stranger to just land on your doorstep with nearly aggressive kindness and to forcibly include you in a social group.

It’s not at all surprising that En man… struck such a nerve with Swedes. Zakrisson mentions the book by name in Grannskapsrevolutionen and the research that she presents there supports the general background feeling in the novel: that the average person (Swede? Stockholmer?) feels isolated and lonely and disconnected from the people around them. And unlike some of the conflicts with the “white shirts” Ove has throughout the novel, the solution to that problem is maybe only possible at a grassroots, individual level. There’s no municipal authority that can come and declare by fiat that this or that collection of buildings is a community. Individual actors have to decide to say hello, or help change a bike tire, or whatever else. The happy ending of En man… no doubt reflects the world a lot of its readers wished they lived in, where they felt like part of a meaningful social network.

Anyway thank you for coming to my TEDtalk about a goofy comedy novel that clearly didn’t deserve THIS much critical analysis.

Grannskapsrevolution

A vacation is never complete without a book purchase! At my WWOOF host’s recommendation, my roommate and I dropped in to shop at the varuhall in Orsa while he went to pick up the sailboat for winter storage. The artisanal and tourist goods on display included copies of Grannskapsrevolution; if memory serves there was a sign about how it was a book from a local author. The topic matter was also relevant to a lot I’ve been thinking about recently, including my personal projects outside of work, so it seemed like a natural choice for a souvenir.

Author Lina Zakrisson works as a social sustainability consultant focused on helping various stakeholders (residents, property owners, etc.) create stronger, more vibrant local communities. Grannskapsrevolution is thus a combination of manifesto, marketing, and DIY guide on just that topic—she makes an explicit point of highlighting her consulting work, though you still get plenty of tips and information for your money without any scummy “sign up for my course to learn more” sales pitches. But Grannskapsrevolution seems like a condensed version of Melody Warnick’s This is Where You Belong tailored to a Swedish (Stockholm?) target demographic, so reviewing it in English feels a bit pointless. I’ll just wrap up by saying that I expect my copy will be circulating among the board members of my local buy-nothing association and by highlighting what was the most memorable anecdote in the book for me:

One of Zakrisson’s neighbors ran into her while she was out walking her dog and that launched a fair bit of smalltalk, since her neighbor was also a dog owner. As they parted ways, the neighbor invited her over for a fika sometime and Zakrisson agreed enthusiastically. Yes, of course! That would be lovely! Then when she got home, she thought, Wait, it’s a bit weird to just invite a perfect stranger into your home like that. Or what if she’s some kind of psycho? The fika gets put off and delayed for a while because Zakrisson isn’t sure what to make of it. Of course the story ends with her eventually making good on the invitation, and of course she has a lovely time, and in the end that neighbor becomes an actual friend. As an afterthought, Zakrisson adds that once she got to know this neighbor better, she learned that her neighbor was American, and even though she’d lived in Sweden for years by now, she had still had grown up in the US.

Me, an American: of course she was an American, lol

Also me, an American: so that’s how all of my invitations land with Swedes

Synners

A chapter out of Pat Cadigan’s Synners appeared in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, and I enjoyed it so much I decided to read the whole book.

The whole book, it turns out, is a bit of a tome: 496 pages of a tome, to be exact. That’s a full two hundred pages longer than Neuromancer, its cyberpunk partner-in-crime and most apt comparison. Can the center hold?

For me, I’m not so sure. There’s a lot going on in Synners and I’m not even sure what happened.

We have Visual Mark and Gina, two music video creators working for a corporate behemoth called Diversifications, Inc. after their scrappy little independent studio was sucked up in a merger. We have Gabe, an adman also working for Diversifications, Inc., who is addicted to playing hyper-immersive video games (think Star Trek holodeck style) and the company of two AI? imaginary? personalities. We have Sam, Gabe’s estranged and emancipated teenage daughter and wunderkind hacker, returning to LA from a retreat in the Ozarks after receiving a mysterious data dump from her hacker friend Keely. That information, it turns out, is high-level top-secret corporate espionage material from Diversifications, Inc. pertaining to the next product they’re getting ready to launch: sockets that will allow people to connect to the Internet directly from their brains (Neuralink, essentially). The sockets work well enough…at first. Then crisis hits and Gina, Gabe, and Sam have to team up in virtual reality to halt the march of a deadly stroke-inducing virus.

I’m pretty sure that’s what I read, anyway.

In between those important plot points is a lot of stage setting to build the atmosphere of Retrofuturistic Cyberpunk LA, which I’m sure hit a lot different in 1991 than it does now.

This is where I’m of two minds. Cadigan has the imagination as well as the work ethic to really build a fantastic and immersive world that’s fun to spend time in, but the actual plot spends a lot of time stumbling around. The initial pacing of everything had me expecting a story about how our ragtag group of heroes would hack the planet, expose the corporate greed and malfeasance at Diversifications, Inc., and send the bad guys to jail. But then somewhere around the halfway? two-thirds? mark, Diversifications, Inc. wins their much-needed approval from the Food, Drug, and Software Administration and the sockets become a fait accompli. Okay, well, now what?

If deus ex machina is the name for a pat and unsatisfying solution to a plot problem, what’s the name for a pat and unsatisfying problem introduced into a story to drag it out? The deus ex machina problem here is the virtual reality stroke virus: its connection to everything that happened before is tenuous at best, which makes the final climactic fight? showdown? feel slapped on and irrelevant. This is the stuff that seems most interesting to Cadigan, and she could have started everything right after the introduction of the sockets to slow burn the tension through growing numbers of unexplained deaths until we arrive at the existentialist showdown with the source of it all. So why didn’t she?

Synners was published in 1991. If I’m inferring correctly from Cadigan’s dedication, it was more of a “long time coming” novel than a “frantic and immediate burst of genius” novel, and that tracks with just how much The 80s come through in the story. It’s like a cross between MTV, the Sprawl trilogy, and a romcom, all in a Clockwork Orange-level patois.

Positive reviews from recent years enthusiastically declaim Cadigan’s vision of the future as “spot on” but you really have to squint to get Cadigan’s ideas and our world today to line up. People in Synners are still walking around with offline camcorders and connecting to the Internet through physical landlines; music videos, of all things, have gained primary cultural import; their online world has that distinctly visual/spatial paradigm the 80s futurists assumed things would take, with goggles and sensor suits and the like. It’s all extremely dated.

Of course, if you tilt your head sideways you can reinterpret music videos as the omnipresent video content on places like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and people like Visual Mark and Gina as a kind of influencer, but even then it’s an unsatisfying fit because the ultimate climax of the book comes down to the naïve chestnut of But What Does It Mean To Be Human When You’re A Machine. Mark and Gina’s relationship to their audience, and even to the videos they create, isn’t really a topic of concern or at all relevant to the plot. The condensation of online content ownership and delivery into a small number of huge corporate overlords is the one thing that maps pretty neatly on to today, but it’s not much more than background radiation, the inciting incident that kicks off the actual plot.

Much as I love the spirit of linguistic playfulness in the slang throughout Synners, it did a lot to get in the way of the book for me. Not only in understanding what was happening, or what characters meant, but also in just enjoying the book. What’s fresh and exhilarating in a single chapter (in, for example, an anthology like Flame Wars) is exhausting to keep up for close to five hundred pages. For all of Cadigan’s focus on music, and groove, and rhythm, the language itself is often choppy and awkward. Even (tragically) in dialogue, where flow and sound is especially important. Or puns or slang that feel like a stretch. “Synner,” for one, short for “synthesizer,” as in people like Gina and Visual Mark: that one is just too cutesy and too much of a reach to really land for me.

All of that said, this is the rare book I can understand reading again. Going into things a second time, with foreknowledge about the shape of things to come, could well be a better experience than the first time around.

En rackarunge

My hosts in Dalarna had a fantastic library of children’s literature spanning the interests of three generations. What a curious thing to see the Sweet Valley High paperbacks of my own childhood on the same shelf as authors like Ester Blenda Nordström!

Nordström’s series of children’s books, starting with En rackarunge, is purported to be an unacknowledged source of inspiration for Astrid Lindgren. The rackarunge in question—Ann-Mari—bears a resemblance to Pippi Longstocking in character as well as appearance, and predates the first Pippi book by some years. Admittedly, it’s hard to prove these things either way, so who’s to say for sure.

The Swedish half of the couple saw me paging through the book during my downtime and remarked on the differences between children’s literature now and then.

“I tried reading some of those older books to the kids when they were small, and it’s just a completely different experience. They’re so slow, nothing happens, there’s so much description. Books these days, there’s always something happening. It’s such a different energy.”

Indeed. En rackarunge is also more of a short story collection than a novel. Each chapter is a self-contained little adventure, although there are some recurring characters and situations throughout that (kind of) tie all of the adventures into one loose story. Not to mention it touches on pretty dark stuff for a children’s book of today: one of the red threads throughout the book is Ann-Mari’s friendship with a Josef, young man newly released from prison for murdering his physically and emotionally abusive uncle. He’s only scraping by at the margins of society when Ann-Mari first meets him, a total outcast from his hometown. Nordström’s reportage consistently highlighted the marginalized and the suffering, from her initial breakthrough as an undercover journalist investigating labor conditions for domestic help to her condemnation of the brutality of the bullfights she attended in Spain and her advocacy on behalf of destitute Finns starving near to death in a famine. Josef’s arc in the last third or so of the book is another culmination of Nordström’s concern for the downtrodden, and of course it’s Ann-Mari who decides to help him.

Why did Pippi become such a mainstay, while Ann-Mari vanished into obscurity?

Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back

I picked up Chokepoint Capitalism from my host’s bookshelf in London because I was worried about finishing the emergency book in my purse too early and because I guess I love reading about economics now?

Cory Doctorow was a name already familiar to me, as someone who reads science fiction and is terminally online, and I was glad to see him reined in somewhat by Professor Rebecca Giblin. Not that any of his ideas are distasteful or extreme, or that I even fundamentally disagree with him, but Doctorow’s style when it comes to writing about politics or economics can be a bit over-the-top.

Chokepoint Capitalism is a detailed, academic-based look at how Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, ClearChannel/iHeartRadio, Apple, Live Nation and other behemoths have solidified a hold on their respective markets, what the authors term “chokepoints.” I say “academic-based” because it is clearly deeply researched (no doubt Giblin’s contribution), but the presentation and style is still more in the vein of popular science (popular economics?) than dry scholarly reading. Giblin and Doctorow bring the receipts, as the kids no longer say. These companies have actively removed any other mediator between artists and audiences, and as the only gatekeepers can dictate essentially whatever terms they like, in terms of selling but also in terms of buying.

Part of the reason I write these dorky little book reports is to help me remember what I read. For novels and fiction, it’s simply a matter of not wanting whole hours of my life to disappear down the memory hole. But for nonfiction it also becomes a matter of actually learning something from what I’ve read, which is to say I’ve started this particular dorky little book report when Chokepoint Capitalism was no longer fresh in my mind and almost all of the details and nuance have already vanished.

Fortunately Giblin and Doctorow gave an interview about the book to explain it so I don’t have to.

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe

I think The Bright Ages ended up on my TBR because I saw a Swedish copy at my in-laws and thought the topic sounded interesting, especially since my knowledge of Medieval history begins and ends with the interdisciplinary unit we had in middle school. While people crack jokes all the time about the perceived uselessness of fields like Medieval studies, familiarity with the period seems like good starting point for understanding how our current economic system got to be the way it is—and I’m sure I’m not the only person with a growing interest in that particular piece of history. Plus, as authors Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry point out in the introduction, a (historically inaccurate) popular understanding of the Middle Ages informs political ideology even today. Educating the public is therefore part of improving the health of our political dialogue.

They have their work cut out for them, no doubt. How well did they succeed?

This is another case where ebook reading no doubt hampered my comprehension, especially since I read it in bits and pieces over a relatively long period. I started it sometime before my trip to the US in May, and I finished it on a flight to London on July 30. Even though each chapter is more or less standalone, focusing on a particular event or development, such a long time in between reading sessions meant all the previous context had long since vanished into the memory hole.

But more than that, after I finished the book I struggled to articulate how The Bright Ages had shed new light on the topic (if you’ll forgive the pun). Gabriele and Perry do an excellent job of bringing in marginalized figures into the picture, and they also continually emphasize how interconnected the world was at the time: goods and therefore people traveled across incredible distances, like barefoot Christian monks traveling within the Mongol empire. At the same time, it’s hard to argue that an era was more enlightened or humane than we give it credit for when you’re simultaneously describing book burnings and religious violence. Other points it seems like the distinction was one of semantics more than anything else. Whether or not Rome actually “fell,” it still declined in political importance. Of course, it could be that I didn’t even know enough to be dangerous, as the expression goes, and therefore don’t have a deeply ingrained imagined history to be debunked.

Whatever else, the writing is also always engaging and easy to follow. Gabriele and Perry depart from the typically dry style of academic writing and take a warm, conversationalist tone. As a result, The Bright Engages is a fun and engaging read, and the fact that it took me so long to finish the book is not in any way a commentary on its quality. It’s me, I’m the problem.

Shadow Speaker

Shadow Speaker was one of many, many books that got dumped on my TBR back when I had discovered that book blogs were a thing, so it’s been waiting there about as long as Bel Canto. Discussion with some friends about African mythology in Dungeons & Dragons reminded me of the book, and wouldn’t you know it was available at the library.

Shadow Speaker is set in a kind of post-apocalyptic future Niger, though civilizations in this world came out the other side more or less okay thanks to magic (or juju, to use Okorafor’s own terminology). Our protagonist, Ejii, can see in the dark and communicate with shadows (who take on a very ghost-like quality); other people can fly or control the weather. Ejii travels with a talking camel named Onion. Forests appear and disappear at random. Much of this juju seems to spring from Peace Bombs, devices set off by a radical Haitian environmental group immediately after some cataclysmic nuclear incident.

In addition to triggering juju in people and places, the Peace Bombs also did something weird to the space-time continuum, bringing it in closer contact with fantastic alien worlds. This contact has invited an escalated new threat: interplanetary war. Ginen, the world that seems to be the closest and most intimately connected with Earth, has a beautiful but delicate post-scarcity ecosystem that would be wiped out by the kind of pollution our own Earth has (so far) managed to withstand, and its desperate, reactionary leader is keen to launch a preemptive invasion to neutralize the threat.

This is the huge existential crisis that Ejii is dragged into. The chorus of shadows around her have commanded her to find the imperious Red Queen, Jaa, and join her on a diplomatic mission to Ginen. Also, as it happens, Jaa decapitated Ejii’s dictatorial father right in front of her when she was a young girl.

Nnedi Okorafor is no small potatoes author. She has a substantial body of work to her name, as well as multiple awards (including the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Eisner). But looking at the timeline, Shadow Speaker is early on in her career. It might only be her second novel, if I’m reading the timeline right? There were parts that I loved about Shadow Speaker but in the final analysis, it was just too clunky to really get into.

The good: The vibe of this book is great. Okorafor’s world is highly imaginative on multiple levels: the story requires her to establish not only a post-apocalyptic Niger, but also the rules of the a new magical system as well as the xenobiology of alien worlds. Those are a lot of plates to juggle, and on that level the book is exceptionally coherent. Everything about the setting slots together very elegantly. The world where Ejii has cat’s eyes and can talk to spirits in no way clashes with the world where interplanetary warfare looms at the threshold.

Where it falls down for me is just about everywhere else.

It’s unfortunate the original edition is out of print because I would have liked to compare the two. The most substantial change, from my understanding, is a new prologue for the latest Shadow Speaker, and it does the book a huge disservice.

In the prologue the reader encounters the Desert Magician, establishing a framing device whereby you, the reader, are a visitor in their tent and they are relaying you a story. Except not at all? There’s no reference to the framing device for the rest of the story, and then we actually meet the Desert Magician in the story being told. I didn’t think about the trainwreck of framing devices while I was reading because by that point I had forgotten about the prologue entirely, which is not great praise for the intervening pages.

But more than structural inconsistency, the prologue also sets up false expectations in terms of writing. Shadow Speaker came out in 2007 and the new edition is from 2023. The good news is that Okorafor has clearly grown as a writer, because the prologue has a sophisticated and distinctive voice throughout; the bad news is that the prologue sets the bar way too high for the rest of the writing to come.

The plot mostly seems there for the sake of the world. It’s not particularly complex and reads more like a series of disconnected episodes then an unfolding of events, where resolutions to crises have consequences that engender new crises. To name a couple:

The dramatic earthquake at the beginning of the story proper has zero ramifications for Ejii or anyone else in the village. It’s not what starts Ejii on her quest, it’s not what triggers Jaa’s departure from the village, it’s nothing. The one and only purpose it serves is to prompt a homework assignment from Ejii’s teacher that functions as a perfunctory flashback, but authorial necessity isn’t the same thing as plot necessity.

Not long after the earthquake, Ejii gets into a fight with her obnoxious half-brother. He shares their father’s views on the subjugation of women and has been needling Ejii for most of his existence thus far in the book. Like the earthquake, this altercation carries no consequences for anyone. Ejii isn’t in trouble or otherwise prevented from carrying out the quest given to her by her shadows, so the most you can say about this scene is that it establishes her character.

Ejii overhears Jaa asking her mother to take on Ejii as an apprentice, a call to action immediately made redundant by instructions from Ejii’s shadows. And while this is where Ejii first learns that Jaa plans to assassinate the leader of Ginen during the coming talks, this information in no way influences any of the decisions Ejii makes once she joins Jaa’s company. Most of the time it seems like she’s just forgotten it.

And so on, and so on. A secondary character dies tragically in a pointless conflict that functioned neither as a meaningful obstacle to characters accomplishing their goals or as a meaningful victory and development in personal growth. Things seem to happen to Ejii and her friend Dikeogu that mostly serve as fun hijinks rather than as a natural outgrowth of previous actions. It has the tone of a made-for-TV family adventure movie on 90s era Nickelodeon or Disney Channel: the children are the heroes tasked with saving the day, the immediate peril is almost non-existent, whimsy and wackiness is through the roof, the adults are forever cowed or outwitted by children.

The characters, sad to say, don’t make the plot failings easy to overlook. There is the vague shape of a character arc for Ejii—a shadow of one, if you will—but it never really takes form. The book explains to us that Ejii seems to be getting stronger and more comfortable with her powers, and more assertive and sure of herself, during her sojourn in the desert, but it’s never in relation to some incident or even effort on her part. There is an intimation that she feels bad about not being as skilled as her friends, who have had training longer than she has, but this is essentially only mentioned in passing. The challenges that Ejii faces where she’s called on to use her powers are for the most part easily surmountable and have the feeling of the tutorial level in a video game where you learn how to use a new skill. “Stand here and listen to the old man’s inner monologue. Respond appropriately. Achievement unlocked!”

Early on, the escaped slave boy Dikeogu meets Ejii and joins her on her quest, and while Okorafor is clearly trying to use Dikeogu and his backstory to explore how trauma and violent brutalization can leave permanent marks, it never lands as very nuanced (maybe a tall order when Dikeogu is never a perspective character). Mostly his interactions with Ejii introduce a lot of unnecessary screaming or shouting into the dialogue.

The adults around Ejii and Dikeogu seem like they would be compelling and interesting characters in their own stories, but obviously here they’re sidelined for the children. My ultimate conclusion is that the YA designation might have been an albatross around the book’s neck, as the weakest elements of the book seem to stem from attempts to keep it simple and superficial.

“Why are you reading YA books, then? All that stuff bugs you because you’re not the target audience, this is what kids and teens like!”

I mean, true. I just wish there was a version of Shadow Speaker that was like a hundred pages longer and that gave the story the complexity it deserved. Maybe that’s Binti?