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..