Akata Witch

Akata Witch’s strength is its setting: a fully-realised, diverse magical community in Nigeria, the hub of a wider African magical world. Instead of wands, practitioners carry juju knives; characters come from a range of different African ethnic and linguistic groups. Nnedi Okorafor’s magical-realist world-building is fantastic, and the aspect of this book which I enjoyed most.

It’s possible that the book would work better on the whole for its intended audience (young adult) than it did for me, though. The pacing is off, the four main characters act more like 16 or 17 year olds than they do prepubescent 12 year olds, and there are wild tonal shifts and odd emotional responses (or to be more precise, a lack of emotional response) show more which are just jarring. Major things happen to all the child characters but with no real sense of emotional consequence, and I really didn’t like the implications of magic “fixing” Sunny’s albinism. That’s tapping into an ugly trope about disability in fiction. show less

I really loved this book. I give it unreserved praise. Here's what stood out, while it is fresh in my mind. First: the characters were engaging and relatable. They appeared human: endearing for their foibles as much as their strengths. Second: the conflict was engaging and the resolution reasonable. Super-hero stories can be tricky, this one was managed well. Nnedi paced it VERY well. Third: it pointed to richer and deeper stories in many directions. This adult reader finds a lot of YA fails here. Okorafor seeds her work with hints and clues about music, history, culture, and politics. Not enough to make it a didactic novel, but enough to make a keen teen's head buzz with curiosity about Afro-pop, Biafra, and oil politics.

This is a show more triumph. show less

Though the premise of the book is VERY familiar-- a young protagonist feels like a total outsider until they learn they have ~~**special powers**~~ in a magical world they never knew existed-- Okorafor pulls it off by creating a compelling Nigerian-inspired fantastical setting. At first glance, the Leopard World seems almost downright utopian (your characteristics that makes you different are celebrated instead of ridiculed! you earn money when you LEARN things!), but Sunny soon learns that there are some major drawbacks to her new identity #childendangerment

4.5/5 To simply say that this book is a Nigerian Harry Potter would be to do it a disservice. Sunny is a complex character in her own right with troubles vastly different than HP. An albino who tries to get through each day without being bullied, Sunny's life drastically changes when she befriend Orlu and Chichi, who help plunge her into the world of the Leopard People, where your worst trait becomes your best asset. Unputdownable.

Excellent, excellent book! This is only the second series that I’ve read which explores African magic, and unsurprisingly I’m totally hooked. There’s lots of similarities with other cultural magic systems (magic is magic, and it’s semantics that differentiate them), but it’s still interesting getting to learn about how sorcerers from other cultures harness and use their magic. In this story, our protagonist Sunny discovers that she is one of the magical people of Africa - a Leopard Person - and embarks on a journey with a group of newfound friends to discover her magic. Little does Sunny know at the outset of this journey, but she and her friends are destined to confront and take down the generation’s most dangerous and evil show more magician who has remained undefeated for years and is putting the whole magical community (and the world) in danger. While we’ve seen this storytelling trope before in many tales of youthful self/magical discovery, Okorafor has created highly developed characters, set up the bones for a magical world ripe for exploration, and gives us just enough sparkle throughout the story to keep us hooked until the very end. With our protagonist, she has also created a character who is one in a million, as Sunny grapples with many challenges which set her outside her community - she’s African, but born in America; she’s a girl, but refuses not to challenge the boys in the traditional African patriarchal society; and she’s Albino, which sets her apart even amongst her magical community for her ability to walk between worlds. Her ancestral magic, which skipped a generation from her grandmother, is also extremely intriguing, as we barely touched on some of these abilities which hint to a greater innate power than many of the Leopard People, which is specifically linked to her ties to the spirit world. This series only has one more book, so I can’t wait to find out where Sunny will go next in her journey of magical discovery. show less

Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch focuses on twelve-year-old Sunny Nwazue, an albino Nigerian-American girl who discovers that she possesses magical abilities. This opens the door to a world she never knew existed, in which she is a “free agent” living among the Leopard People’s magical community in West Africa. Together with her friends – Orlu, who attends a non-magical school with her; the mysterious Chichi, who lives with her mother and has more books than anyone Sunny knows; and Sasha, an American sent to Nigeria to learn some responsibility after abusing his powers back home – she learns the world from their teacher, Anatov. As they progress through their lessons and bond as a group, the leaders of the magical community show more inform the four that they must fight a dangerous sorcerer to prevent the end of the world, which Sunny has seen in the flame of a candle.

Okorafor takes the usual tropes of students learning magic in a world bigger than they’d imagined and strips away the perfect protagonists and generic monsters. Each of her characters begins the story with their own personal baggage. The best they can hope for is to make peace with it so they may grow as people. She also offers an empowering lesson about viewing the things that make people different – their flaws, quirks, and foibles – as the source of their abilities. Further, while many stories about magic children feature wunderkinds who instantly master each subject, Sunny, Orlu, Chichi, and Sasha must work to learn most of their subjects beyond those few that come innately. The repeated motif of libraries, both personal and institutional, drives home the importance of learning. At one point, Orlu says, “Leopard People are different. The only way you can earn chittim is by learning. The more you learn, the more chittim you earn. Knowledge is the center of all things” (pg. 82). Okorafor further developed this message in her Binti series. A must-read for fantasy fans! show less

Akata Witch is the story of twelve-year-old Sunny Nwazue, an American-born albino child of Nigerian parents, who moves with her family back to Nigeria, where she learns that she has latent magical powers which she and three similarly gifted friends use to catch a serial killer.

Nnedi Okorafor, author of the wonderful adult fantasy sci-fi novel Lagoon, creates a brilliantly distinctive world in this magical-realist synthesis of West African and American history and mythology. Fantasy fans will enjoy familiar themes in a new and original setting. Just like any young magician, Sunny must learn the rules of her magic and pay the price when she breaks them -- such as when she uses her "spirit face" to scare a bullying classmate. Readers might show more be tempted to compare the Leopard People’s magical village of Leopard Knocks to Diagon Alley and the Zuma Festival to the Quidditch World Cup, but beyond these surface similarities to the Harry Potter series, the world and society of the Leopard People is truly unique. This isn't a Nigerian Harry Potter story, as it has been dubbed by some., This is highly original stuff that draws on Okorafor's heritage (as she was born in the US to two Nigerian parents) to create a very fascinating story embedded in a sense of place. Okorafor never loses sight of the believable trials of her characters, conjuring a world in which magic doesn’t feel so far removed from the wonders and mysteries of growing up in our own world.

The novel may start slow but grows into quite an action packed and scary ride. Fans of world mythology, paranormal thrillers, & the works of Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin will love this novel, because it shows just how close we are to a magical and dangerous reality. There's both good juju and bad juju out there. Be careful. show less