Twelve-year-old Sunny Nwazue feels like an outsider several times over. She was born in America but is living in Nigeria, where her parents and brothers were born. Because she’s an albino, she has to carry an umbrella to shield her skin from the sun, and she thinks her eyes look “like God ran out of the right color.” Her average day on the schoolgrounds involves just as much name-calling as you’d expect, complicated by the tensions and prejudices among more than a dozen different social groups, each with its own language and each language with its own insults. (Akata? Is a rude word for people not born in Africa.)
Sometimes you feel like an outsider because that’s the way the world works. And sometimes you feel like an outsider because you’re really not part of this world.
Sunny’s first clue came the day she looked into a candle flame and saw a vision of the world ending. When two new friends initiate her into the local network of magic-working folk, she gets a glimpse into her true nature: one of the Leopard People, someone who can see into the spirit world, and a Free Agent, which is unusual even among Leopards. Together with another recent émigré from the U.S., the four children make up a quartet balanced in magical abilities, a quartet that is clearly intended to Fight Crime. Magical crime, that is.
Their mission: to defeat Black Hat Otokoto, a rogue Leopard who kidnaps and kills small children.
It’s almost impossible not to read this series opener as a Nigerian twist on Harry Potter, with Okorafur’s usual inventive touches. (My favorite: Leopard People earn their money by learning things. When you figure something out, coins called chittim drop out of the air around you—little ones for a little breakthrough and big, head-conking ones for a serious moment of enlightenment. As a librarian, I am all in favor of this system.)
Akata Witch is the start of a new series, and it also serves as a sort of prequel to Okorafor’s Shadow Speaker.
Check the WRL catalog for The Akata Witch.
