Laith
Book Club for December (I know it's February) ____________
I haven't kept up with the book club lately, I shouldn't have skipped the Hitchhiker's re-read because it totally threw off the rhythm I had going with these. That's half of the case for the delay here, I missed the deadline and put it down half finished, until last week. I wouldn't chalk the cause of the pause entirely up to a busted schedule, no, I put Akata Witch down because I didn't like the book. I won't leave the reader in suspense, it's because this is YA. I'll admit my bias here, and it's an obvious one, I am not in the YA demo and these books don't really do much for me. Likewise, I'm not sure if I can tell good YA apart from bad YA at this point, but I've read better YA than this.
Akata Witch is easy to wrap your head around, what if Harry Potter took place in Nigeria and the magic was less about wands and more about Juju. We join Sunny, an adolescent albino girl whose family has recently repatriated to Nigeria from the US. Through Sunny's American eyes, readers get a speedy introduction to Nigeria before diving further into the world of the Leopard People (Wizards). Sunny makes friends with Orlu, Chi-Chi, and Sasha, eventually joining them under the magical/juju-ical tutelage of Anton. Just as Sunny as gets her bearings in the secret world of wizards Leopards, she learns that she and her classmates are fated to battle the Black Hat; Nigeria's child murdering Voldemort.
That's all you really need to know, this is Nigerian Harry Potter. Its got the same strengths as HP as well, namely in discovery and atmosphere. There are some things I really liked here: I thought that the Juju-magic system was very interesting and much better developed than the magic in HP. It was cool how the magic system was inspired by and used to introduce some of the folklore and fill in cultural gaps that American readers are bound to run into with a book like this. This book also retains that coming of age/adolescent transformation aspect that made Harry Potter such a relatable YA read. The best moments in the book come as Sunny comes to grasp her power and new identity. It doesn't hurt either that the dynamic of Sunny's friend group is fun and supportive, the book shines brightest when it's just Sunny and the gang going about their days.
Unfortunately, that's all I came to like about this book. Akata Witch manages to copy and alter almost every aspect of Harry Potter, it sticks to the formula, but it's just worse. One big failure of the book early on was with how little explanation of the "wizarding world" there was. I might call this weak world building, but it's not that there was a failure to build a world, more-so there wasn't enough explanation. In Harry Potter, nearly 3/4s of that first book is devoted to explaining and exploring every aspect of the world. Introducing shopkeepers, Quiditch, and chocolate frogs, it's all contextualized as Harry comes into contact with it. Meanwhile Akata Witch just drops you in, explaining only where necessary and seemingly making as little use of Sunny's status as a student as possible. That's just not going to work when the reader is not familiar with Nigeria much less your Afro-magical world! It's not like the magic was well explained either, Sunny may have been learning Juju but none of it carried over to the reader, that, or Leopard Knocks has a vastly inferior curriculum to Hogwarts and Sunny is just as clueless as I am.
It was "Black Hat" as the Voldemort stand in that took me over the edge. I never liked the fated child trope to begin with, and now you're telling me that the villain in this book isn't just magical Hitler (as Voldy was) but he's also a serial child murderer (that the muggles, sorry, "lambs" are AWARE AND TERRIFIED of) and the only plan the elder magicians have is to task a squad of teens, one of whom literally started learning magicJuju that day, to deal with him while doing absolutely nothing else about it. This is where I put the book down.
Having gotten past that, I can say that my dislike of this book came down to how disjointed the pacing of the book was coupled with how obvious of a lift of Harry Potter it is. This story had a really structured series of milestones that the characters had to get to, but the interconnecting story tissue that fills the gaps between moments isn't effective. This story feels abrupt, things happen because they have to happen, not because a character has caused them to happen. With the story basically set on rails there's no real pay off when Sunny and the gang eventually overcome their foe. In fact, our heroes have nothing to do with the mechanism that defeats Black Hat, their only contribution to his defeat being their geographic proximity to him.
This was supposed to be a wizard-come-of-age story but I didn't really feel the pay-off here. This was a cool idea with lackluster execution, and credit where it's due, so much of what I read in this book was new and interesting to me, it just wasn't enough to overcome the novice/lifted story structure.
Book Club for December (I know it's February) ____________
I haven't kept up with the book club lately, I shouldn't have skipped the Hitchhiker's re-read because it totally threw off the rhythm I had going with these. That's half of the case for the delay here, I missed the deadline and put it down half finished, until last week. I wouldn't chalk the cause of the pause entirely up to a busted schedule, no, I put Akata Witch down because I didn't like the book. I won't leave the reader in suspense, it's because this is YA. I'll admit my bias here, and it's an obvious one, I am not in the YA demo and these books don't really do much for me. Likewise, I'm not sure if I can tell good YA apart from bad YA at this point, but I've read better YA than this.
Akata Witch is easy to wrap your head around, what if Harry Potter took place in Nigeria and the magic was less about wands and more about Juju. We join Sunny, an adolescent albino girl whose family has recently repatriated to Nigeria from the US. Through Sunny's American eyes, readers get a speedy introduction to Nigeria before diving further into the world of the Leopard People (Wizards). Sunny makes friends with Orlu, Chi-Chi, and Sasha, eventually joining them under the magical/juju-ical tutelage of Anton. Just as Sunny as gets her bearings in the secret world of wizards Leopards, she learns that she and her classmates are fated to battle the Black Hat; Nigeria's child murdering Voldemort.
That's all you really need to know, this is Nigerian Harry Potter. Its got the same strengths as HP as well, namely in discovery and atmosphere. There are some things I really liked here: I thought that the Juju-magic system was very interesting and much better developed than the magic in HP. It was cool how the magic system was inspired by and used to introduce some of the folklore and fill in cultural gaps that American readers are bound to run into with a book like this. This book also retains that coming of age/adolescent transformation aspect that made Harry Potter such a relatable YA read. The best moments in the book come as Sunny comes to grasp her power and new identity. It doesn't hurt either that the dynamic of Sunny's friend group is fun and supportive, the book shines brightest when it's just Sunny and the gang going about their days.
Unfortunately, that's all I came to like about this book. Akata Witch manages to copy and alter almost every aspect of Harry Potter, it sticks to the formula, but it's just worse. One big failure of the book early on was with how little explanation of the "wizarding world" there was. I might call this weak world building, but it's not that there was a failure to build a world, more-so there wasn't enough explanation. In Harry Potter, nearly 3/4s of that first book is devoted to explaining and exploring every aspect of the world. Introducing shopkeepers, Quiditch, and chocolate frogs, it's all contextualized as Harry comes into contact with it. Meanwhile Akata Witch just drops you in, explaining only where necessary and seemingly making as little use of Sunny's status as a student as possible. That's just not going to work when the reader is not familiar with Nigeria much less your Afro-magical world! It's not like the magic was well explained either, Sunny may have been learning Juju but none of it carried over to the reader, that, or Leopard Knocks has a vastly inferior curriculum to Hogwarts and Sunny is just as clueless as I am.
It was "Black Hat" as the Voldemort stand in that took me over the edge. I never liked the fated child trope to begin with, and now you're telling me that the villain in this book isn't just magical Hitler (as Voldy was) but he's also a serial child murderer (that the muggles, sorry, "lambs" are AWARE AND TERRIFIED of) and the only plan the elder magicians have is to task a squad of teens, one of whom literally started learning magicJuju that day, to deal with him while doing absolutely nothing else about it. This is where I put the book down.
Having gotten past that, I can say that my dislike of this book came down to how disjointed the pacing of the book was coupled with how obvious of a lift of Harry Potter it is. This story had a really structured series of milestones that the characters had to get to, but the interconnecting story tissue that fills the gaps between moments isn't effective. This story feels abrupt, things happen because they have to happen, not because a character has caused them to happen. With the story basically set on rails there's no real pay off when Sunny and the gang eventually overcome their foe. In fact, our heroes have nothing to do with the mechanism that defeats Black Hat, their only contribution to his defeat being their geographic proximity to him.
This was supposed to be a wizard-come-of-age story but I didn't really feel the pay-off here. This was a cool idea with lackluster execution, and credit where it's due, so much of what I read in this book was new and interesting to me, it just wasn't enough to overcome the novice/lifted story structure.