The Black Pages - Nnedi Okorafor - ★.½

AUTHOR: Nnedi Okorafor

SERIES: Black Stars, #2

GENRE: Fantasy.

RATING: 1.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: Great ingredients in this short story, but they didn’t come together to make a delectable dish.

Story Synopsis:

Issaka is visiting home in “Timbouctou”, but his timing is bad. There has been a major al-Qaeda raid in the area, the local library has been burnt, and there are some ancient books at stake. When trouble comes to his doorstep, his only hope of safety is an ancient being named Faro, who has somehow resurrected from the flames of a book and is now guiding Issaka towards his past and safety.

The story comes to us from the third person limited perspective of Issaka and Faro.

Factors that made the story sound like it had great potential: the burning of libraries, the African setting, an OwnVoices story (to a certain extent), the idea of magical ancient beings, the al-Qaeda factor. If all these concepts had been woven together neatly, the story would have delivered a memorable impact. What I got instead was just elements that worked in patches but didn’t come together to make a seamless whole. The blurb, for once, is a little bit helpful as it helps understand a few points that aren’t even mentioned in the story.

This 30-page tale has a lot of “whats” but no “hows” or “whys”. We know that Faro is some kind of ancient being rises from the ashes of a burnt book, but the connection between Faro and Issaka stays vague. (There is a reason mentioned in the story, but this was of no use as it raises more questions than it answered.) There is no explanation about why Issaka (or his past version) trapped Faro in the book, who the other fantastical beings were, why Issaka could see spirits, what was his mother’s exact role, did his father know the paranormal presence in the lives of his wife and son,,… So many unanswered questions!

The ending doesn’t even deserve to be called an ending. It is not even the end of a scene, forget being the end of the story.

The only thing I liked about the story was Faro’s adventures with (or maybe I should say, ‘inside’) Issaka’s iPad. It was fun to see an old entity navigate the modern technological superhighway and grasping it even faster than we did.

There’s no mention of the country anywhere, which I guess makes even the place fantastical. “Timbouctou” seems to be a corrupted spelling of Timbuktu in Mali. The actual Timbuktu is the capital of the Tombouctou administrative province, so maybe the two names were conjoined to create this fictional location. Basically, this is the only major clue we can use to guess that the story is based in Mali, other than a reference to the locals’ hatred for the French. (Some reviews mention the country as being Afghanistan. I am guessing those readers presumed this from the mention of al-Qaeda. But the setting is clearly the ex-French colony of Mali.)

I feel that this tale might have worked better as a novella, if not a novel, as it had the potential to deliver a wallop. But in the current format, it ends with too many unanswered questions and offers no closure at all.

Not worth it.

‘The Black Pages’ is the second standalone story in the ‘Black Stars’ series, a collection of speculative fiction from Black authors. This series is available for free to Amazon Prime subscribers.