Genre: science fantasy

#BookReview: The Girl Who Made a Mouse From Her Grandfather’s Whiskers by Kenneth Hunter Gordon

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The Girl Who Made a Mouse From Her Grandfather’s Whiskers by Kenneth Hunter GordonThe Girl Who Made a Mouse From Her Grandfather’s Whiskers by Kenneth Hunter Gordon
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fairy tales, science fantasy, science fiction
Pages: 160
Published by Lanternfish Press on March 17, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In a distant future, a little girl named Anny makes toy mice out of scraps and dust. Anny has never seen a real mouse, just as she’s never seen the planet her family came from many generations ago. All she knows is her home, Tsedt: an isolated village of human colonists’ descendants and their friendly helper robots.
But then one day the Amau arrive in Tsedt: plastic people with luminous eyes, intent on taking young humans to the distant city of Harbor to be educated. It’s not long before Anny is flown away to a place unlike any she’s seen before.

My Review:

What would fairy tales look like on a world that, once upon a time, was settled by human colony ships? Somehow, the idea of Aesop or B’rer Fox and B’rer Rabbit, or even the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, still being the stories that children get told to help them cope with the world or get life and morality lessons, doesn’t quite work. (Disney might make it, but imagining what that would look like would be a different book entirely!)

That Anny’s remote village is a farming village that reads like somewhere in fantasy land makes the story itself feel like fantasy. That little Anny’s best friends are the veritable army of mice made out of scraps and fluff that she keeps under her bed AND, more importantly, writes stories about in her head, just adds to that impression of fae and fantasy.

At least until her grandfather – and his helper robot, Oskar – move in. Not because of Oskar, as there are plenty of “billies” (short for habilibots) around the little village. They just don’t personally impinge on Anny’s childhood all that much.

But because of her grandfather. Grandfather who remembers the early days of the colony, and, more important for the story, the early days of the city that grew up around the colony ships and their landing site. His memories, as interpreted through Oskar, disturb the peace of the household even though they seem like, well, fairy tales. Or the product of the disordered mind of an old man who is losing it. Or both.

And that’s the point where the story takes a turn into the Twilight Zone. Literally if you squint a bit. Because the people from the city, now called Harbor, suddenly find the little village. And start making the kind of offers that people – at least young people in a small village dreaming of more – mostly don’t want to refuse.

A trip to the ‘big city’. A chance to see the world outside their tiny village. The hope of a new, bigger, better, brighter, life. Grandfather knows it’s all a lie, but no one wants to listen.

Except little Anny. When the people from Harbor come for her, she knows she’s in danger – even if she isn’t quite able to understand why or how. She can tell that their truth is not THE truth, and that she needs to find a way to escape. If she can.

And that’s when the mice, not just her mice, and not just the mouse she made with her grandfather’s whiskers, come to her rescue so that she has a chance to rescue her family. Even if Anny, with the help of the mice, has to destroy much of Harbor in the process.

Escape Rating B: At first, I had a bit of a time getting into this one. I think you kind of have to just go with it for a bit and let it grab you. Or you have to settle into Anny’s perspective and stop worrying about whether what she’s telling you is happening is REAL, just in her imagination, or actually a child’s interpretation of events that are above her head but all around her.

In that sense, it reminded me of One Level Down, as we’re also seeing that SFnal world from a child’s perspective, at least at first. That world is every bit as cruel in its way as Anny’s world is in hers, and Anny has to break herself out by reaching a perspective of a less child-like version of herself.

Anny’s world is just that bit less cruel because the terrible things that happen to her are caused by outside agencies, where the child in One Level Down is betrayed by her own family. So there’s a bit of a remove that helps the reader ease into things here.

The reader, on the outside looking in, knows that the situation in Harbor is not a damn thing like the people from Harbor present it to be. Anyone who has read even a bit of SF can easily determine the exact ways in which that situation is very, very wrong. And it does have a bit of a Twilight Zone feel in the way it’s currently going wrong.

But part of the SFnal element – and all of the fairy tale elements – are carried in the paws of the mice. Not just Anny’s mice, but the mice she finds at Harbor, hidden in the walls, powering the infrastructure and perfectly capable of setting that infrastructure on fire. Which they do, because Anny, in her own way, is one of them.

How Anny becomes one of them, whether her own mice or real or imaginary constructs or imaginary wrapping for something else real is never fully explained and doesn’t have to be. Because we’re Team Anny every step of the way, and if Anny needs to pretend to be Anny Mouse or become Anny Mouse or just be ANNYMOUSE (anonymous), that’s just fine with us as long as some version of Anny brings down Harbor and gets to take herself and her people HOME.

Grade A #BookReview: The Daughter Who Remains by Nnedi Okorafor

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: The Daughter Who Remains by Nnedi OkoraforThe Daughter Who Remains (She Who Knows, #3) by Nnedi Okorafor
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: African Futurism, science fantasy, science fiction
Series: She Who Knows #3
Pages: 192
Published by DAW on February 17, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Set in the universe Africanfuturist luminary Nnedi Okorafor first introduced in the World Fantasy Award-winning Who Fears Death, The Daughter Who Remains is the breathtaking conclusion to the She Who Knows trilogy
Featuring Najeeba, now older and wiser than readers have ever known her, this is a tale of family,courage, and healing

Najeeba has something terrible to kill.

And now she’s off to go and kill it. A fully trained, mature, and sharply focused sorcerer (don’t call her sorceress), Najeeba has left the comfort and security of her town with two companions, the glass maker Dedan and the old camel MorningStar. This journey takes her back to where it all began. And despite the fact that her training with the sorcerer Aro forced her to face her deepest fears, she hasn’t seen anything close to what she’s about to see.

As the Igbo proverb goes, a masquerade does not dance for nothing. The Daughter Who Remains is the final book in the She Who Knows trilogy. This tale isn’t about Najeeba learning to master her powerful skills, it’s about her having the audacity and courage to use them and use them well…no matter the consequence.

My Review:

This final novella in the She Who Knows trilogy brings the story of Najeeba, the ‘she who knows’ of the series title, full circle, back to the place – if not the time or even the world – where she began in the opening book, also titled She Who Knows after Najeeba herself.

Najeeba’s first daughter was Onyesonwu, Who Fears Death, a woman who clearly didn’t. Onyesonwu sacrificed her life, indeed, her very existence, to fix their broken world and make it a place where their people – and indeed all people – had a chance to not just survive, but thrive.

But that sacrifice didn’t just kill Onyesonwu and the friends who willingly undertook that journey with her. It also erased her existence from time and memory and rewrote the entire history of the world, even in the memories of the people who were alive at the time of her sacrifice.

Even the history books rewrote themselves to reflect the new past that resulted from her sacrifice.

Najeeba calls that time, the time she bore and raised her first daughter, as ‘The Before’. It’s a time that only sorcerers like Najeeba – as well as a few others who have certain particular kinds of magic – remember at all.

But Najeeba does remember that ‘Before’. It’s not just that she remembers the daughter she gave to history, but that she remembers her own history, the mistakes she made, the evils she encountered and the cursed duty she accepted from her father as he was dying. Dying as a result of one of her mistakes.

Najeeba has lived her life twice over, her childhood and young womanhood in The Before, and a life of training and purpose and happiness and even redemption in the world that came after Onyesonwu’s sacrifice.

As this final entry in Najeeba’s story opens, she is pregnant and on a journey across the desert. Just as all sorcerers learn the manner of their own deaths at the completion of their training, Najeeba knows that this journey is fated.

It’s time for her to return to the place where she was born – even if that is no longer the place that she remembers OR the place that remembers her. Because she made her father a promise as he lay dying. She promised to kill the monster who blighted his family before Najeeba herself was ever born.

A monster who has been blighting her people, taking away the best and the brightest, those who have the ability to change the world for the better – and making them less than they could be. Less than their people need them to be if the world is to keep moving forward.

It’s her duty to kill the seemingly unkillable, knowing that she will sacrifice herself in fulfilling that last duty to her father. Little does she know that her promise was fated all along. Because she might have been willing to let the cup pass to another – but she cannot, she will not, let this monster diminish the light of the daughter who remains.

Escape Rating A: This series has been terrific from the very beginning, and this final volume does a marvelous job of pulling together the remaining loose ends, taking the story back to its – and Najeeba’s start and bringing her life, her journey and her story to a right, fitting and beautiful end for her and for the reader.

This is a hint not to start here at the end. If Najeeba’s journey sounds as fascinating to you as it turned out to be for this reader, start with She Who Knows (sometimes titled She Who Knows: Firespitter) and be prepared for an epic journey.

While THIS entire saga serves as a kind of framing story for the author’s award-winning epic, Who Fears Death, it is not absolutely necessary to read that earlier book in order to be fully engaged and enmeshed in this series. I know it’s not because I haven’t read it YET, and yet found Najeeba’s journey utterly absorbing.

This final entry in the series manages to combine both a closing and an opening, as contradictory as those two states often are. Najeeba is closing the circle of her life. She KNOWS this is her final journey, she knows she’s heading towards her death. So there’s more than a bit of a sense of melancholy, both on her own part and particularly on the part of her husband Dedan.

While Najeeba is also dealing with, or perhaps that should be toying with, the idea of letting this cup pass to another. The Before is gone, unremembered and unremarked. And, as is often the case, as she marches towards her death she finally finds much of what she has been seeking all of her life. She finds a place she can truly call home. She finds joy in her life and especially in the newborn daughter she names Ikuku but the home she wants to adopt calls Sssolu.

She’s lost this child before she ever really got to know her, and it’s not fair.

But neither is the monster she must kill, and it’s in that fight and the reasons for it that so much resonance to the entire saga and to the ‘real’ world comes into fascinating play. ‘The Cleanser’, the demon she must kill, is frightening in a very real way that I can’t stop thinking about.

The Cleanser ‘cleanses’ her people of their best and brightest, taking those who have the power and capability to change their world, to make things better, and diminishes them, giving them so-called ‘gifts’ that seem marvelous but are ultimately empty. It takes away their drive and gives them beauty, fortune and charisma. They spend their lives seeking adoration and adulation, but waste their promise. From a certain, 21st century perspective, they become entertainers and influencers instead of scientists and engineers. Instead of being people who DO, they become people are merely ARE, generation after generation.

And their world, and perhaps ours, is a poorer place for that, even though our world, at least, is a richer place for this author’s fantastic and fascinating work..

Grade A #BookReview: Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara TrueloveOf Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, queer fiction, science fantasy, science fiction, science fiction horror, vampires
Pages: 407
Published by Bindery Books on June 3, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Spaceships aren’t programmed to seek revenge—but for Dracula, Demeter will make an exception.
Demeter just wants to do her job: shuttling humans between Earth and Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately, her passengers keep dying—and not from equipment failures, as her AI medical system, Steward, would have her believe. These are paranormal murders, and they began when one nasty, ancient vampire decided to board Demeter and kill all her humans.
To keep from getting decommissioned, Demeter must join forces with her own team: A werewolf. An engineer built from the dead. A pharaoh with otherworldly powers. A vampire with a grudge. A fleet of cheerful spider drones. Together, this motley crew will face down the ultimate evil—Dracula.
The queer love child of pulp horror and ​classic ​sci-fi, Of Monsters and ​Mainframes ​is a dazzling, heartfelt odyssey that probes what it means to be one of society’s monsters—and explores the many types of friendship that make us human.

My Review:

The spiderbots should have been the first clue – because they’re RENFIELDs. But I’ll admit that I didn’t get it – or at least didn’t believe I got it – until Demeter went through her cargo manifest and I caught the names of the companies to whom that initial cargo belonged. Names like Holmwood, Billington and Morris – not to mention poor Captain Harker Jones and Mina Murray. Because all of those names that sent a shiver down my spine, including the name of that poor haunted ghost ship Demeter, lead to one monster and one monster only – Vlad Tepes himself.

Drakula, or as modern parlance had it long before the first doomed voyage of the space liner Demeter, Dracula.

The idea that the monsters we’ve feared and dreamed of over the millennia have followed us out into the wider galaxy is not new. My favorite take on this particular idea is STILL Break Out by Nina Croft. It’s also what fuels the nightmares of space horror like The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown as well as the work of S.A. Barnes (Ghost Station, Dead Silence, and Cold Eternity)

But this particular nightmare is a bit different from the rest, as it is not told from a human or even a monstrous point of view. Instead, the alarums in this blend of pulp horror and classic SF (and vice versa) are rung by the AI running the ship, Demeter herself.

The orderly ones and zeros of Demeter’s programming are sent into their own tiny little tailspins. Poor Demeter’s efficiency drops into negative numbers. Which, in turn, gives the poor beleaguered AI nightmares of decommissioning and being piloted into the sun by corporate overlords who need to blame SOMEONE for the mass deaths aboard the newly dubbed ‘ghost ship’ even though it’s NOT HER FAULT that a monster keeps erasing her logs to mask a series of monstrous presences – one journey after another.

First – because he’s always first – Dracula. But the Count is followed by a werewolf – as vampires so often are. Then a ship full of refugees from Innsmouth in search of a route to the Great Old One himself. Then Frankenstein’s ‘monster’ and last but not least – well, not least depending on how you reckon things like most and least – the Mummy, also known as ‘Steve’.

The story gets wilder and crazier as it goes – and from a certain, artificially intelligent but deliberately askew perspective – so does poor Demeter. Her programming tells her nothing is wrong – even as she hurtles her way towards a sun that will destroy her and the true monster aboard her. But just as her programming tells her there are no monsters – her scant, surviving bits of memory tell her that what’s wrong is caused by one of those monsters that doesn’t exist. In the end – and very nearly hers – it’s the friends and even family that Demeter has managed to gather around herself – in spite of herself and the programming that says she can’t feel, or love – who save her, not just from the monster inside her, but from the monsters inside each other.

Escape Rating A: That grade feels like a pin thrown at a dartboard, or a measurement of just how much of the spaghetti thrown at the wall of this off-the-wall story managed to stick. A story that marvelously manages to be both a wild romp of a ride and a day trip to crazytown at the same time.

What makes it work is the way that the layers accrete, that it gets scarier and crazier and gathers more heart and souls to it as it goes down into the dark. And then rises in a big ball of fire and a blaze of glory.

And yes, dear merciful heaven, that’s a metric buttload of mixed metaphors.

The idea that monsters have/will follow us into space isn’t new. (I really, really LOVED Nina Croft’s Break Out, with its tale of vampires and werewolves smuggling themselves onto sleeper ships to cross the galaxy and what happened after.) There’s plenty of space horror out there now, as that genre is experiencing a renaissance thanks to S.A. Barnes’ work. (My fave is still The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown).

That this story is mostly told from Demeter’s perspective, along with a whole lot of snarky commentary by her frenemy Steward the medical AI, gives us a new perspective to play with – one rather like Scorn from Aimee Ogden’s Emergent Properties – that added a new layer of panic, confusion and motivation to a story that has been told before.

There’s even a Dracula story from the perspective of the captain of HIS Demeter in The Route of Ice and Salt by Jose Luis Zarate, but something about this particular version really grabbed me, and I think it’s the AI Demeter herself. She manages to be both so human and so other at the same time and I was happy to see this parade of monsters and monsters hunting monsters through her eyes – even if she doesn’t always have eyes.

In the end, we feel for her even when she doesn’t believe her programming allows her to feel for herself. We want her to succeed. We want her band/crew of rogue monsters to survive. And we want the two AIs, Demeter and Steward, to go from enemies to frenemies to friends to whatever comes next for them. And we especially want all of them to make a home, together, with each other, plying the spacelanes where no monster has gone before.

A- #BookReview: One Way Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: One Way Witch by Nnedi OkoraforOne Way Witch (She Who Knows, #2) by Nnedi Okorafor
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: African Futurism, science fantasy, science fiction
Series: She Who Knows #2
Pages: 240
Published by DAW on April 29, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Set in the universe Africanfuturist luminary Nnedi Okorafor first introduced in the World Fantasy Award-winning Who Fears Death, One Way Witch is the second in the She Who Knows trilogy

The world has forgotten Onyesonwu.

As a teen, Najeeba learned to become the beast of wind, fire and dust: the kponyungo. When that took too much from her, including the life of her father, she let it all go, and for a time, she was happy — until only a few years later, when the small, normal life she’d built was violently destroyed.

Now in her forties and years beyond the death of her second husband, Najeeba has just lost her beloved daughter. Onyesonwu saved the world. Najeeba knows this well, but the world does not. This is how the juju her daughter evoked works. One other person who remembers is Onyesonwu’s teacher Aro, a harsh and hard-headed sorcerer. Najeeba has decided to ask him to teach her the Mystic Points, the powerful heart of sorcery. There is something awful Najeeba needs to kill and the Mystic Points are the only way. Najeeba is truly her daughter’s mother.

When Aro agrees to help, Najeeba is at last ready to forge her future. But first, she must confront her past — for certain memories cannot lie in unmarked graves.

My Review:

Najeeba’s name means “She Who Knows” and she is the One Way Witch of this novella trilogy. Which is both a prequel and a sequel to Who Fears Death, as is totally utterly fitting because Onyesonwu, the “who fears death” protagonist of that novel, is her daughter.

Was her daughter.

Past and present tenses get knocked a bit off-kilter in the second book of Najeeba’s story, as Who Fears Death happened between the first book of the trilogy, She Who Knows, and this second one.

But Onyesonwu didn’t merely die at the end of her story, she sacrificed herself in order to change the world, to kick the universe – or at least Earth’s little corner of it – onto an entirely different track. She literally changed the world and everyone in it, wiping out their history, their actions, even their memories, healing a whole lot that was toxic and wrong and erasing her own existence.

Najeeba remembers everything, both the ‘Before’ that only other sorcerers remember, and the ‘Now’ that everyone else believes has always been.

One Way Witch is the story of Najeeba’s reconciliation between the dark and painful past that already was – at least for her – with the ‘Now’ that moves forward into the future. The only way out is through, and it’s a ‘one way’ trip that demands that she move into the future with it – otherwise her powers will destroy not merely herself but everyone around her as well as a peace that is more fragile than she first imagined.

Escape Rating A-: As a reader who has not yet managed to get back and read Who Fears Death (so many books, so little time, so many shiny new adventures on the horizon), this second novella in the trilogy worked better for me because it is about Najeeba’s world as it now is. The story is moving forward, even though of course Najeeba looks back at the daughter she misses.

At the same time, the plot device that powers the story is a familiar one, both from SF and fantasy but also from fanfiction that deals with those genres. One Way Witch is a story about reconciliation, not so much between people or even countries as it is between the past one remembers and the crimes that were committed in it, and the new future that one has sacrificed so much to bring about.

Najeeba is surrounded by people who bullied and mistreated her daughter in the past that has been literally wiped away. She remembers how truly awful some of them were, but the people they are now aren’t actually guilty of anything. At the same time, the circumstances that created some of her deepest adult friendships also didn’t happen, so she’s forced to let those friendships go because they never were.

Every silver lining has a cloud, after all.

Just because people don’t remember the world her daughter wiped away, that doesn’t mean that the trauma that they suffered in that alternate history doesn’t linger in their subconscious. Or their collective memory. Or their souls. The world is reshaping itself as people who were slaves in the old past can’t bear to stay where they were shackled – even if they no longer remember any of it.

The world – or at least the people in it, are on the move, trying to find the places that their hearts call home – even if they don’t know why. The new peace is fragile because people are fragile, and it’s breaking.

(Something that I expect to be part of the final book in the trilogy.)

Unlike so many middle books in trilogies, One Way Witch is not a descent into deep darkness and despair – and it’s lovely to see a story break that pattern. Instead, this story feels like it’s a restart of Najeeba’s story. Not in the sense that she can’t remember the past, but rather that her past and THE past were defined by her trauma, and that this story is about reconciling with her own past and finding her own ‘one way’ into the future.

This reader is looking forward to a future where the final book in the trilogy will be available. Najeeba has plenty of journey and adventure yet to come, and I can’t wait to read it.

#BookReview: She Who Knows: Firespitter by Nnedi Okorafor

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: She Who Knows: Firespitter by Nnedi OkoraforShe Who Knows by Nnedi Okorafor
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: African Futurism, science fantasy, science fiction
Series: She Who Knows #1
Pages: 176
Published by DAW on August 20, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Part science fiction, part fantasy, and entirely infused with West African culture and spirituality, this novella offers an intimate glimpse into the life of a teenager whose coming of age will herald a new age for her world. Set in the universe Africanfuturist luminary Nnedi Okorafor first introduced in the World Fantasy Award-winning Who Fears Death, Firespitter is the first in the She Who Knows trilogy
When there is a call, there is often a response.
Najeeba knows.
She has had The Call. But how can a 13-year-old girl have the Call? Only men and boys experience the annual call to the Salt Roads. What’s just happened to Najeeba has never happened in the history of her village. But it’s not a terrible thing, just strange. So when she leaves with her father and brothers to mine salt at the Dead Lake, there’s neither fanfare nor protest. For Najeeba, it’s a dream come travel by camel, open skies, and a chance to see a spectacular place she’s only heard about. However, there must have been something to the rule, because Najeeba’s presence on the road changes everything and her family will never be the same.
Small, intimate, up close, and deceptively quiet, this is the beginning of the Kponyungo Sorceress.

My Review:

The story begins, as so many of this author’s stories do, with a young African woman on the cusp of change in a world that has already changed and been changed from the one we know now.

In the case of this particular story and this particular young woman and this particular version of the future, Najeeba is thirteen when the story begins, and is about to go on a journey. A journey that members of her family take every year – but a journey that females are not supposed to undertake at all.

Not that there are laws against it, but there are rules – rules enforced by a social contract that have ossified into restrictions that no one challenges. Not until Najeeba comes in and tells her parents that she feels the call of the ancestral salt road every bit as much – if not a bit more and a bit sooner – than her father and her brothers.

In the desert, salt is life. Finding the best salt, the purest AND prettiest blocks of it, and selling them for the best price in distant markets, keeps her family and her village alive and prosperous. Most of the time.

Because her people have historically been considered unclean, untouchable outcasts. A judgment that Najeeba’s inclusion in the annual salt harvest is guaranteed to make worse AND more violent – even as it confers upon Najeeba the kind of power that is guaranteed to bring down retribution – both human and divine.

And gives birth, literally and figuratively, to a woman who will change the world.

Escape Rating B+: She Who Knows is the first book in a prequel trilogy of novellas to the author’s award-winning novel Who Fears Death. In a way that story literally gives birth to this one as this one gives birth to that, as Najeeba, “she who knows”, is the mother of Onyesonwu, “who fears death”.

I haven’t read Who Fears Death, although I have a copy in both text and audio and plan to listen to it. While it has certainly climbed up the virtually towering TBR pile after finishing She Who Knows, I don’t feel like I missed anything by reading this book first. After all, it IS a prequel and not a sequel. It sets the stage for Who Fears Death without giving anything away or providing spoilers.

What it does remind me of, a lot, is the author’s Desert Magician’s Duology, particularly Shadow Speaker. Not only do Najeeba’s and Eiji’s stories start from a similar place, as both begin their stories as girls on the cusp of womanhood, gifted or cursed (depending on one’s perspective) with magical powers, but both choose difficult paths that their birth cultures reserve for men and they also find themselves telling – and being told – their stories by and to strange desert sorcerers.

They are not products of the same Afrocentric future world, but their worlds are similar nonetheless. Meaning that if you like one, or if you have enjoyed ANY of the author’s previous and/or successive works such as the Binti Trilogy, there’s a very good chance you’ll fall right into She Who Knows as well.

In the end – and also as a beginning – this is a great introduction to Who Fears Death AND The Book of Phoenix, which is a much earlier prequel chronologically to Onye’s story. Not only is this a great story in its own right, but it’s also short which means that it provides an introduction in an easily consumed little package. And if that consumption leaves you with a taste for more – as it very much did this reader – this is, oh-so-thankfully, the first novella in the projected trilogy of equally short and undoubtedly equally salty and delicious stories.

I am definitely looking forward to the rest of Najeeba’s story, which will be continued in next year’s One Way Witch. In the meantime I can’t wait to see how the mother’s experiences in this book and the rest of the trilogy are reflected in the child in Who Fears Death.