![]() ![]() When Ejii learns of Jaa’s belief that she is to become Niger’s next warrior queen, she decides to follow Jaa into another world, embarking on a perilous walkabout in the traditional quest of shadow speakers. When she was 9, Ejii witnessed her father’s beheading by the warrior queen Sarauniya Jaa but far from being traumatized, she was overjoyed her father had become a tyrant, and she was relieved he was gone. ![]() The two are strong enough to save the world, or destroy it. Ejii can speak to shadows, while Dikéogu, the boy who will become her truest friend and companion, can pull rain and lightning from the sky. Some children are now born “metahuman,” with special gifts. The book’s 14-year-old heroine, Ejii Ugabe, lives in a dystopian Niger, changed not only by nuclear war but by “Peace Bombs” weapons developed by a militant environmentalist group to “create where the nuclear bombs destroyed.” These sent a “vast green-tinted wave” across all seven continents, ushering the world into the Great Change a time when magic was unleashed all over the planet, and earthquakes and their aftershocks tore holes in the atmosphere between worlds. It’s easy to name a dozen fantasy novels set in England but, save for Nancy Farmer’s futuristic book “The Ear, the Eye and the Arm,” difficult to think of one set anywhere in Africa just one of many unexpected pleasures in Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu’s novel “The Shadow Speaker.” ![]()
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