Home (Binti, #2) by Nnedi Okorafor Formats available: paperback, ebook
Series: Binti #2
Pages: 176
Published by Tor.com on January 31st 2017
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads
The thrilling sequel to the Nebula and Hugo winning Binti.
It’s been a year since Binti and Okwu enrolled at Oomza University. A year since Binti was declared a hero for uniting two warring planets. A year since she left her family to pursue her dream.
And now she must return home to her people, with her friend Okwu by her side, to face her family and face her elders.
But Okwu will be the first of his race to set foot on Earth in over a hundred years, and the first ever to come in peace.
After generations of conflict can human and Meduse ever learn to truly live in harmony?
Praise for Nnedi Okorafor:
"Binti is a supreme read about a sexy, edgy Afropolitan in space! It's a wondrous combination of extra-terrestrial adventure and age-old African diplomacy. Unforgettable!" - Wanuri Kahiu, award winning Kenyan film director of Pumzi and From a Whisper
"A perfect dove-tailing of tribal and futuristic, of sentient space ships and ancient cultural traditions, Binti was a beautiful story to read.” – Little Red Reviewer
“Binti is a wonderful and memorable coming of age story which, to paraphrase Lord of the Rings, shows that one girl can change the course of the galaxy.” – Geek Syndicate
“Binti packs a punch because it is such a rich, complex tale of identity, both personal and cultural… and like all of Nnedi Okorafor’s works, this one is also highly, highly recommended.” – Kirkus Reviews
"There's more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okorafor's work than in whole volumes of ordinary fantasy epics." -Ursula Le Guin
"Okorafor's impressive inventiveness never flags." - Gary K. Wolfe on Lagoon
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
My Review:
There are two literary traditions that revolve around the thought and place we call “home”. One is the Thomas Wolfe version. That’s the “you can’t go home again” version of home. The other is the Robert Frost version, the one that says that “home is the place that, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
After the events of last year’s award-winning Binti, and a year at the intergalactic Oomza Uni, Binti desperately needs home to be the Frost version. She feels that there is something wrong with her, and that she needs the healing that only her home place can provide.
But when she gets there, she discovers that it is the Wolfe version of home. She ran away, not because anything terrible happened or would happen, but because the safe, secure and traditional plans that her family and her village all had for her future were too confining for her intellect and her spirit.
She stood on the shoulders of her village and saw further than anyone had in a long time. And, the people she thought were her own wanted to chop her off at the knees for it.
No one is right and no one is wrong. Binti is just a bit different from everyone she thought she knew, and everyone who believed that she was theirs. And much too much has happened for her to go back and become the smaller person that they all wanted her to be.
But just as Binti’s own Himba village people are looked down upon by the cosmopolitan, city-dwelling Khoosh, Binti herself has absorbed the prejudices of her own Himba people towards the elusive Desert People. Binti’s self-perception, even her very identity, are threatened when she learns that the Desert People are much, much more than the savage wanderers they appear to be.
And that she is one of them.
Escape Rating B-: I found the first story in this series, Binti, to be utterly absorbing from the opening paragraphs. But Home was much less so. Just as Binti seems suddenly unsettled at Oomza Uni as this story opens, as a reader I also felt unsettled. Binti found her involvement with her environment problematic, and I found my involvement with her equally so.
Binti couldn’t focus and neither could I. This was a story where I finally finished on the third attempt. I’m glad that I did, but this just didn’t grab me the way that the original did.
Home is also a middle book. While the overarching story moves forward in Home, it does not end. Or it ends on a cliffhanger. But the ending felt unsatisfying. I was hoping for some kind of conclusion, even if an interim one. Binti, in spite of its relatively short length, told a complete story, beginning, middle AND end. Home feels like all middle. And muddle.
I hope that the next book in this series, The Night Masquerade, brings Binti’s story to an exciting and satisfying conclusion.
