What if the far future doesn’t look all that different from our present?
This duology by Nnedi Okorafor consists of two fairly short novels, so I’ll review them both at once.
The concept is that, a decade or so before the book takes place, someone invented what they called “Peace Bombs,” which were intended to avert nuclear war.
What happened instead is tears in whatever separates our world from other dimensions.
Now there are portals in various places around the planet that allow travel between dimensions.
That means you get everything you always get when two worlds collide: you get new technology, but also a clash of cultures and beliefs, not to mention good old-fashioned xenophobia.
In addition to all that, the tears in the fabric between worlds also resulted in some people getting certain abilities, including the ability to control weather and the ability to speak to shadows and/or animals. Some animals even gained the power to talk to all humans.
Ejii is a young girl with the ability to speak to shadows. Her two best friends are also shadow speakers and they all attend lessons with the same tutor to learn how to use their abilities.
Ejii’s mom was married to a man who took over as chief of their village and ruled with an iron fist. Ejii’s mom left him when she was pregnant with Ejii and before he came to power. She was treated as an outcast while he went on to marry multiple other women and have children by them, then consolidate his power by bringing back “the old ways” i.e. subjugating women, forcing them to wear burkas, forcing young girls to marry grown men, and allowing men to have multiple wives without allowing women to have multiple husbands.
But Jaa has two husbands.
Jaa is the woman who had ruled their village until she decided it was time to move on, leaving the power vacuum that enabled Ejii’s dad to rise to power.
When Ejii was nine, Jaa returned and beheaded Ejii’s father in the town square in front of everyone – including Ejii.
Jaa has been in power ever since. Now there are rumors she’s ready to move on again and she’s going to leave Ejii’s mom in power.
What the rumors don’t say is that she’s planning to take Ejii with her.
Jaa is heading to one of the other worlds where representatives from all the affected dimensions will meet to try and hammer out a treaty so they can live in peace.
But the king hosting the assembly doesn’t seem interested in peace. Jaa is also uninterested in peace, but it’s debatable whether that’s a reaction to what she expects from the council, or if violence is her default. After all, she did behead Ejii’s father without so much as a trial. Ejii and her mother view Jaa as a kind of hero, but the other wives and children of the former chief view her much the same way Ejii viewed her father: as a violent dictator who took control by force and instituted her own will on the village.
Ejii is more inclined to peace, and after a considerable amount of violence and bloodshed, and with some help from some of the more peaceful members of the council, manages to get everyone to more or less agree on a truce that will hold for five years.
Along the way to this council, Ejii, Jaa, and Jaa’s husbands encounter a boy named Dikéogu. He’s about Ejii’s age and escaped from a cocoa plantation where he was held as a slave and forced to grow and harvest the cocoa beans.
He also has some magical abilities: he can control the weather, although he doesn’t know it yet. He just knows he tends to attract lightning when there’s a thunderstorm, but it doesn’t hurt him when it strikes.
The second book focuses on Dikéogu as he learns to wield his powers, falls in love with a girl until he witnesses her murder by what appear to be vampires.
That sends him into such a pit of grief, he doesn’t emerge for a year, and he has no memory of what he did or saw in that year. The memories come back to him slowly and they are not pretty. At one point he even admits his brain is protecting him from the knowledge of the horrors he inflicted (or failed to prevent) by holding back those memories.
Eventually, he meets back up with Ejii around the time the truce is scheduled to expire. The king they managed to prevent Jaa from killing is clearly gearing up for war, while a growing faction of humans in our world have become so fearful of the strange and unknown that they view those with special abilities as less than human and deserving of death.
More bloodshed ensues, and for a while, I wasn’t sure our heroes would survive.
This was a fun, fast paced, action packed duology, but so much more violent than I had been expecting!