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“No matter what choice I made, I was never going to have a normal life, really. I looked around and immediately knew what to do next.��

Awards are not to be trusted.

Sometimes they get it right by accident, but for the most part the assessment criteria seem to have little to do with the quality of the work.

Binti tells the story of the girl Binti (surprise!) of the Himba people, primitive isolationists who are desperately reluctant to hinder her, a prodigy among them, to leave their reclusive society in order to attend space university. She does anyway, running away from her family, there are some extremely dangerous complications that she’s able to very easily solve because... she’s the protagonist, aaaand... the end.

Binti is a novella not without its merits, but certainly not with any particular originality. Neither in the young protagonist from a disenfranchised primitive isolationist culture who's the first to partake in a prestigious institution. Nor in the exploration of culture clash between humans and aliens. These issues have been dealt with again and again by many works of fiction, often far more skilfully than in Binti.

Then there is the juvenile writing style (which, admittedly, makes sense with the first person narrative of a teenage protagonist) and the deus ex machina and the plot holes defying all logic and rules of writing. Is this the mythical originality I've heard about, mayhap?

At its core, Binti alternates between doing too much and too little, inevitably the curse of such a short novella. It can be read as a decent little story, that is neither thought-provoking nor intellectually stimulating, but for the right people (not me) I am sure can be quite fun. I personally thought it was boring and lazily written too, but that's just personal taste. However, I am not entirely uninterested in Okorafors work, and will be on the lookout for more of her writing in the future. Hopefully it proves a lot more of a positive experience.