Summary: After spending a year at college, Binti goes home to face her family.
Science Fiction is the perfect genre to explore so many different ideas. Binti and its follow-up book Binti: Home are both mostly about what it means to grow up, leave home, and be changed by the process so that you are not sure that you can go home again.
I read the award-winning novella Binti a few weeks ago and enjoyed the follow-up novel just as much. Binti has been at Oomza University for about a year (she left to go to college on another world in the middle of the night without telling her family.) Her family is part of an African tribe that trades with the world, but does not leave their village.
(Spoilers for the previous book ahead.) In the previous novella, Binti’s ship was attacked on the way to college, and everyone was killed except for Binti. She was able to negotiate peace with the attackers and the college world, which led to a friendship with one of the attackers (who also had ravaged Earth in an earlier generation.) But in the process, Binti was genetically changed to become partially one of the members of that alien race, which is visibly shown by her dreadlocked hair being transformed into tentacles.
Those tentacles are the visible sign of her inability to ever return to her family and village as a normal member of her society. But what she learns once she is home is that she is far more than she thought. Her father had joined the village from a group of desert nomads. And her paternal grandmother seeks her out on her return.
I want Benti: Home to be a bit longer and to have a follow-up book immediately available. But that is just because I enjoyed the writing. I will pick up some of Okorafor’s other novels while waiting for the next book in the series.
Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition
