In Boing Boing:
World Fantasy Award-winning novelist Nnedi Okorafor's young adult novel is Akata Witch, a beautifully wrought hero's journey story about Sunny, a young girl with albinism born to Nigerian parents in America, and then returned to Nigeria, where she discovers that she is a Leopard Person -- a born sorcerer.
The structure of Sunny's journey to mastery of her wild talent is familiar enough, the stuff of much-loved Rowling and Duane novels. But the world of Leopard People, beautifully presented by Okorafor, makes it sing with freshness. The increasingly difficult challenges that Sunny and her three friends -- a coven predicted in legend and come to Nigeria just in time to save the world from a murdering sorcerer bent on apocalypse -- are each more fascinating and pulse-pounding than the last, and the magic they practice has that dream-logic plausibility of the best fantasy...[continue reading]
