  | Book Details Title: Riot Baby |
Book DescriptionReview “Urgent, brutal. . . . Onyebuchi’s unexpectedly hopeful ending is just as powerful as his unflinching, heartbreaking depictions of racism and cruelty. This staggering story is political speculative fiction at its finest.”―Publishers Weekly, starred review”Onyebuchi sheds light on a world of harsh familiarity and fantastical originality with his incredible worldbuilding and devastating prose. Stark, sharp, and brutal, this story will burn in readers’ minds long after the last page.”―Library Journal, starred review”There is a richness and depth to Onyebuchi’s prose that delivers an intricate and textured world at once rife with violence and teeming with familial love. . . . Onyebuchi demonstrates that dystopia for African-Americans in the U.S. resides in the recent past and continues today.”―Booklist”A thrilling, intense, nail-biting read that transcends genre and has an ending of biblical proportions.”―Grimdark Magazine”Riot Baby bursts at the seams of story with so much fire, passion and power that in the end it turns what we call a narrative into something different altogether.”―Marlon James“Onyebuchi has woven a story as uplifting as it is heartbreaking, an epic ode to the future and past, tiny acts of resistance, love, and the wild unstoppable sweep of revolution.”―Daniel José Older”Tochi Onyebuchi is, primarily, a generous world-builder. His journey into this is honed and sharpened with Riot Baby, which asks a reader to care deeply for the interior of its characters, and the fights they have taken on.”―Hanif Abdurraqib”Riot Baby is the burning embers of a revolution. . . the quiet rage of generations of people who have been told they are lesser than others. It’s the flash of accelerant in a genre that needs the burn.”―Mark Oshiro”Onyebuchi welds a graphic novel sensibility to a searing look at structural inequity in America today. This isn’t Jack Womack or J.G. Ballard’s broken near future: it’s our own photorealistic broken present. Riot Baby is an important book.”―Elizabeth Bear”Stunningly original, brutal, and electric. Onyebuchi’s prose scorches. It’s hard to put this book down, and when you do, it stays with you.”―R. F. Kuang”Onyebuchi’s adult debut is a stunningly, vitally harrowing story and genre at its very best.”―Kiersten White”Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby is thrilling and harrowing in the tradition of Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing.”―Fran Wilde”Powerful. Furious. Riot Baby carries the full weight of black American fury and grief, woven together with a masterful story of two siblings and a magic so powerful it will change the face of everything they know.”―K. B. Wagers Read more About the Author Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African, its sequel, Crown of Thunder, and War Girls. He holds a B.A. from Yale, a M.F.A. in screenwriting from the Tisch School of the Arts, a Master’s degree in droit économique from Sciences Po, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. His fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, Omenana Magazine, Uncanny, and Lightspeed. His non-fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Nowhere Magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. Riot Baby is his adult fiction debut. Read more Customers Review: I have to confess: I liked it better when the story centered around Ella as in the very beginning. Still, if your title is Riot Baby, it is good to base your story on the person who was born during the riots following the Rodney King verdict.This book can be unsettling at times. Besides the raw emotion it contains (I was not raised to be comfortable with the F-word and it still takes me out of the story when I encounter it), I also felt somewhat displaced in time. It starts in the past in what is definitely our past but when the characters are adults, it feels too futuristic and technologically advanced to be our world. I also found the shifts in writing somewhat off-putting. I don’t mind change of POV between characters, but when chapters are suddenly in present tense instead of a more typical narrative-style past tense, it clashes for me.So Ella is the big sister of Kev (Kevin), the riot baby. Ella is special. She has powers – powers which seem pretty endless in parts of the book. They’re mostly mind-based. We see her as a young girl whose secret must be hidden, then suddenly we see both her and her brother as adults.We don’t get much of the story of Kevin’s childhood, but we can piece together pieces. Their mother worked herself ragged trying to provide for them. Ella seemed able to take care of herself, but Kev evidently fell in with young men who got him involved with illegal activities and he wound up in prison.The prison section is hard to read as Onyebuchi writes of the treatment of the prisoners. This isn’t quite our earth, but it’s still a place where black lives don’t seem to matter. It’s probably Ella which keeps Kev sane through all of this – although Ella by now is almost a hallucination. I wasn’t always clear when she was visiting him in the flesh and when she was visiting astrally projecting.I’m rambling. This is a book to ponder. Onyebuchi’s writing is compelling – he draws you in. His characters feel very real as do the emotions he portrays. It won’t ever be my favorite book, but I think it’s one I’m going to need to come back to and revisit from time to time.
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17 reviews