Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor YP FIC OKORAFOR

Sunny was born and raised in New York, but lives in Nigeria.  They call her “Akata,” an insulting term for Americans.  The fact that she is an albino makes her even more of an outsider.  When she sees a vision of Armageddon in the flame of a candle she knows she is truly different.  Soon she finds friends that are different too and discovers she is part of a secret world.  The good news is that she has magic powers, the bad news is she’ll need them to hunt down a black-hatted child killer, creatively named Black Hat.

This is my kind of fantasy.  Set firmly in the real world, with characters you believe in, Akata Witch makes you believe in magic.  Okorafor lets you really get to know Sunny and explores her life in Nigeria before the magic really starts moving the plot forward.  This means, that the book has a slow start, but I really didn’t mind.  It also has a super fast ending, but I was able to forgive some plotting problems because so much about the book is really good. It was as interesting to me to see life in modern Nigeria as it was to learn about a secret group of magic users. That’s what makes this book pretty special, you care about the world beyond just the cool powers AND the cool powers are really super cool! It’s also has a super evil and genuinely menacing villain. I’m always looking for paranormal that isn’t so normal and Akata Witch is way better than normal. 

Broken Memory: A Novel of Rwanda by Elisabeth Combres YP FIC COMBRES

A five year old girl named Emma hides behind the couch and listens helplessly as her mother is murdered. She survives by stifling her own screams and then hiding in bushes as she makes her way across war torn Rwanda, eventually being taken in by an old woman. Nine years pass and the war is long over, but Emma is still haunted by nightmares and cannot remember the past. It will take connecting with other survivors and learning to hope again for Emma to find her memory and start a new life.

Broken Memory takes place in Rwanda 9 years after the civil war in 1994. The novel does a great job of teaching about the conflict in a moving and interesting way. By focusing on one young girl and her perceptions it allows the reader to have a more direct involvement with this tragedy. The writing is very simple and stripped down which makes the descriptions of atrocities even more affecting, because they are described so naturally. This is an excellent story of one girl’s journey into hope and reaffirming life, but it also works as a symbol for Rwanda itself.

In the Forest of the Pygmies / Isabelle Allende

In this third and last installment of Isabelle Allende's trilogy about globe-trotting teens Alexander and Nadia, the travelers find themselves in Kenya on an elephant safari with Alexander's journalist grandmother, Kate.

Their trip starts out in a pretty ordinary way, but soon the group runs into a very persuasive missionary who convinces them to journey deep into the African jungle to help him search for two of his lost compatriots. They soon arrive in a remote jungle village where a trio of evil despots has run off the local queen and enslaved and terrorized the Pygmy and Bantu peoples who live there. Alexander and Nadia must draw on all their intelligence, skills and otherworldly companions to rescue the Pygmies and get themselves and the rest of the International Geographic crew back home with their lives.

This book includes high adventure, a taste of the diversity of the African people and landscapes, and a dash of magical realism. Although you don't have to read the series in order, the author does refer to events in the previous novels. If you want to start at the beginning, the first book is City of the Beasts, and the second is Kingdom of the Golden Dragon.