Books

The Binti Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor was assigned reading for the AP lit and comp class I took in my senior year of high school. It’s received such high praise from so many decorated authors, and I was excited to read it when it was assigned to me. I really wanted to love it but the book was god awful. What hurt the most was that the ideas within were spectacular, like the different alien species, Binti’s culture and the dynamics of her home planet, space ships that are actually living entities and so on, but those ideas were executed miserably. The writing just wasn’t good, the story made no sense. Every conversation my class had about the book was a “Binti bash session,” as we called them. One of my classmates even ripped up his copy of the book and burned some of the pages to display as part of a class project later on in the year.