Thursday, March 9, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Nubia: The Awakening by Clarence A. Haynes and Omar Epps

 


Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on November 8, 2022 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Nubia the Awakening is the first in a YA SciFi/Fantasy novel series written by actor/producer Omar Epps and writer/editor Clarence A. Haynes. The novel weems like an example of a famous person in media opting to go into genre fiction, with the help of an established writer, and that sort of combination can bear some really successful fruit at times (see Janelle Monae's The Memory Librarian). So I was curious to see how this attempt would pan out.

The result is mixed - Nubia: the Awakening takes a lot of pretty typical YA and SF/F concepts: the climate and uprising ravaged future New York City, the wealthy people all moving into a city in the sky, the leader with good publicity manipulating people and creating havoc that he can then take advantage of the PR of stopping, etc. and merges them all together into an afrofuturist novel. And the story's lead protagonists, meet quiet intellectual Uzochi, fierce reckless Zuberi and rebellious angry and abused Lencho all have interesting aspects here, even if they themselves are also pretty typical archetypes. But the book doesn't have the space to do much super interesting with them, with character development rarely having time to actually play out before major events happen to change things, and the main antagonist is such a well-worn archetype that I found it hard to really care by the end of the book, as things played out as anyone could have expected. The book deals with themes of inequality, of discrimination, and more with an unsubtle approach, but it doesn't do so in a way to say anything new or interesting, which makes this a hard recommend, even for Black readers who are looking for such YA featuring Black characters like themselves.

Trigger Warning: Parental Abuse of one of the main characters.


------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
The Year is 2098. New York City, part of a breakaway part of the United States, has been beset by climate change and mass flooding, with massive seawalls being erected to keep the waters out. Meanwhile the wealthiest people have left the rest of NYC behind, moving to Up High, a city in the sky built with antigravity technology, while a privatized security force run by the wealthy Up High leader Kraven St. John patrols the grounds below. Among those left behind on the surface, in a poor neighborhood near a Sea Wall, are immigrants from a previously unknown island, Nubia, which was once a utopia on the coast of West Africa before it was drowned by storms. The Nubians find themselves poor and scrounging to survive as a result, with oppression and racism coming from other citizens and the St. John Soldiers supposedly keeping the peace, even as the next generation of Nubians tries to find a way to live without any memory of their long lost homeland.

Zuberi is a Nubian teen who was taught by her father in the ancient Nubian fighting forms and who relies upon such forms to calm herself in the face of constant oppression and aggression from gangs and soldiers alike. Uzochi is a Nubian class prodigy at their high school who wants to earn one of the few scholarships that can take his family Up High, even if that scholarship requires him to parrot "history" of his people that is incredibly biased and racist. And Uzochi's cousin Lencho finds himself angry at it all and searching for status, as his abusive father treats him horribly and the gang he's a part of, the Divine, isn't interested in his own reckless ideas.

But when the three of them, and other Nubians of their generation, start developing superpowers that were said to belong to Nubia of old, everything begins to change. For, as Zuberi and Uzochi's parents explain to them, those powers were what brought the Nubian peoples together and brought them prosperity, and their return might just mean a change in their fortunes. But Lencho finds himself under the sway instead of the greedy ambitious Kraven St. John, who has his own plans for the Nubians and their superpowers, and will do anything to use them to his own advantage....
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Nubia: The Awakening follows four point of view character throughout its story, Zuberi, Uzochi, and Lencho - as I describe above - and Kraven St. John's daughter Sandra, who serves mainly I guess to be a window into the bad guy's plans as she tries to figure them out and show her own value, and to....I guess, really setup the book's cliffhanger ending for the sequel. Sandra is kind of superfluous as an antagonist or even just a side character, but the other three characters get the main focus of the book, so it's not the biggest deal.

However, a bigger deal here is that the other three characters are largely archetypes who never really get page time to develop in ways that are interesting or make sense, with plotlines that often involve them cutting short character defining moments. So for example, Uzochi finds himself torn - between his original plan of studying to get a scholarship to Up High and abandoning his people, to helping other Nubians with his empathic magical powers, and to the burden that gets put on him being all too great and unfair. He's an interesting character full of depth in those ways, who has to deal with new information and wants and desires of others being put on him all very quickly. And yet, he never is allowed space to actually deal with those conflicting emotions - so he'll quit on the Nubian cause for one second due to the stress...and then be forced back to active service by an attack; he'll feel betrayed by his mother about his uncle's revelations...also cut short; he'll feel like he should be in school....no that doesn't amount to anything either. Instead, we just have the intelligent boy here who has lots of expectations who has to prove his goodness once it all comes down to him, which is fine, but just kinda generic. The same is true of Zuberi who is set up as the good hearted, albeit reckless warrior type character, but who isn't gifted with magic that helps with that...but some form of precognition instead, which seems to show different paths a person could take. But the book doesn't really use her power except as a plot device to move characters along, and every time Zuberi takes an action that seems like an interesting divergence - like she decides at first not to join the elder Nubian planning on training the others, or to leave the group as soon as she gets some training - the plot intervenes before Zuberi gets a chance to follow through, so it might again as well be pointless. We see similar things from the third main character, Lencho, who is blatantly led astray by the major villain and manipulated into doing some terrible things (although he's voluntarily going down the path even before that point), whose conflict with the leadership with the Divine just....goes away without incident.

Essentially the book isn't long enough to really allows the characters to feel the ramifications of their actions, and while the end result might still be the same with 50 more pages, it would allow the characters to feel more 3 dimensional and less like archetypes we've seen before, and allow the plot to flow more evenly. Instead, they kind of feel empty, with me not caring all too much about them and finding it hard to really want to finish this book even when I had less than 50 pages left. This isn't helped by the book's main villain, Kraven St. John, being just generically evil dictator/fascist billionaire: using private security to oppress the lower class and racial minorities who he hates, using false flag ops to ensure good PR, and manipulating some of the magically powered Nubians he gets his hands on into furthering his ends, etc.

Just to be clear here, since I've spent much of this review complaining here: Nubia: the Awakening is fine. There's nothing offensive about the book in any way, and the archetypes the book uses work in the end just fine. And hell, the book even teases a twist in the cliffhanger that might make the second book actually more interesting. So I don't think anyone will read this and dislike it - but it just doesn't stand out in a way to make me want to recommend it, especially since Afrofuturist YA or Black YA Genre novels are thankfully becoming more common. But of course mind you, this reviewer is a White Male, so it's entirely possible I'm underrating the appeal here. But these are the thoughts I have.


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