/lit/ - Literature

>>17494451
Binti: The Complete Trilogy - Nnedi Okorafor
Three relatively short novellas and a novelette form this trilogy. Yes, I'm aware that's four. I apparently confused this with some other book about going to a galactic university and now I've no idea what it was that I was thinking of.
The protagonist is the first of her tribe to be offered admission to the university where only 5% of the students are human and the vast majority aren't even humanoid. So, she goes and on the way an atrocity occurs and she spends rest of the trilogy trying to deal with her PTSD and panic attacks. The school part itself is far too short. It was at its best when it was there and should've only been there.
There are many twists, especially the near, but they're so entirely ridiculous in a terrible way. Some of them, especially the final one, seem to be there to be absurdist humor that mocks genre conventions and expectations, but it really didn't work for me. Even when not being read as serious, though I think it's intended to be serious, there are so many deus ex machina, utterly incoherent plotlines, rushed ideas, inchoate worldbuilding, and mysterious characterizations, that it that beggars belief. Together it gives the feeling of being entirely insubstantial, incomplete, and unfinished. There's a lot that just feels missing from it in general. This should've been a comic or tv series.

Binti: 2.5/5 (18%)
Binti Sacred Fire: 3/5 (10%)
Binti Home: 2.5/5 (30%)
Binti The Night Masquerade: 2/5 (42%)
That comes out to a weighted average of 2.34