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Books: Akata Witch
May. 4th, 2013 07:03 amI'm so glad that there's sports in Akata Witch! Seriously, yay to Nnedi Okorafor, because back when I was a bookseller this is definitely a book I would have cross-marketed to a good chunk of folks who liked Harry Potter, and it would have been because it has magic school stuff and sports stuff. More books should have both, liking magic does not automatically mean you don't like anything else.
Part of me wondered how much this book might be in conscious dialogue with Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, which we read in library school YA lit class and which I've never been entirely comfortable with. There was something about the ways in which disability, the city, and the kidnappings were discussed that made me wonder this, but I can't quite pin it down.
I liked all the quests and the different types of magic and the slow accretion of many different community mentors and how the teen characters balance family stuff, magic society stuff, and the actual social dynamics of life in school and among their magic using peers. The hardest part for me in recommending this book as a bookseller or librarian would have been that the cover, while beautiful, well-designed, and accurate to the text, makes the story look a lot softer-edged and more abstract than the text felt. It's a good cover for this book, I think, but it almost makes me miss the days of ugly collage-scened covers for kids books so we could see them playing soccer and maybe some magic creatures.
Part of me wondered how much this book might be in conscious dialogue with Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, which we read in library school YA lit class and which I've never been entirely comfortable with. There was something about the ways in which disability, the city, and the kidnappings were discussed that made me wonder this, but I can't quite pin it down.
I liked all the quests and the different types of magic and the slow accretion of many different community mentors and how the teen characters balance family stuff, magic society stuff, and the actual social dynamics of life in school and among their magic using peers. The hardest part for me in recommending this book as a bookseller or librarian would have been that the cover, while beautiful, well-designed, and accurate to the text, makes the story look a lot softer-edged and more abstract than the text felt. It's a good cover for this book, I think, but it almost makes me miss the days of ugly collage-scened covers for kids books so we could see them playing soccer and maybe some magic creatures.
