I made this little book live so hard. I used Binti by Nnedi Okarafor to fill three different prompts—”A book by an author of color set in or about space” for Read Harder, “a book set in space” for Popsugar, and “a novella” for Reading Women. I don’t read a lot of sci-fi or a lot of novellas, so I was really lucky to find one book to fill all of these prompts.

I’m all for challenging my reading habits, but when I don’t like a book, it can be really hard to finish it or pay attention to what’s happening. So as I go about introducing myself to new genres, I try to be realistic about what I’ll enjoy. I don’t particularly care for hardcore science fiction or books set in space, so reading a novella worked better than reading something longer, like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Binti was pretty far out of my comfort zone, but I actually really enjoyed it.

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Binti is on her way to Oomza University, the best school in the galaxy. She is the first of her people, the Himbas, to attend. She knows that she doesn’t look like anyone else on the ship to school, but her love and talent for math rivals those of her new classmates.

On their way to Oomza University, the ship is beset my Meduse, an alien race creating terror in the galaxy. They wipe out everyone on the ship—everyone except the pilot and Binti. Desperate to save her life and make it school, the school she gave up her family for, Binti is willing to strike a deal with the Meduse.

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This is a bulky premise for such a short book! Binti clocks in at only 96 pages or two and a half hours on audio. Okorafor focuses her story on Binti’s journey to Oomza University instead of on establishing the world of the story. The novella is solely focused on the plot. This was a smidge confusing in the beginning, but the world of Binti is only marginally different from our world (the Himba people live on Earth, for example) and there are enough markers to make parallels to our world that it’s easy to follow (the black Himbas are persecuted and seen as less than human by other species). After about a third of the novella, it stopped being confusing and I was immersed in the plot.

I listened to this on audiobook at work, cross stitching in my downtime (guys, I love my job). This was a really good way to bypass unusual words that might have slowed me down or pulled me out of the story. The narrator, Robin Miles, was really spectacular. She made the book really immersive. She was Binti. If you listen to audiobooks, you know that sometimes, for whatever reason, a narrator just doesn’t fit the story. Robin Miles fit Binti.

This novella is the first in a trilogy. The other two books are titled Home and The Night Masquerade. They follow Binti and the conflict between the Meduse and the rest of the galaxy. Both are really well-reviewed, but I’m not sure if I’ll pick them up. Space fiction isn’t really my jam and as much as I enjoyed Binti, I don’t think I would re-read it nor do I have any super compelling interest in the rest of the series. Just my personal taste here.

If you like space or science fiction, I can’t recommend Binti enough. It’s compelling, believable, and easy to breeze through in a few hours. I also recommend checking it out on audio. If science fiction isn’t really your thing, than you might want to pass on this one. It’s good, but not earth-shattering enough to change genre preferences.

As always, life is too short to read books you don’t like.

Publisher: Tor
Pages: 96
Rating: 4/5
Publication date: September 22, 2015
Buy: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound