Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor

What made this book exceptional was its simplicity. While many scifi and fantasy books (and everything in between) can make excellent use of baroque language, others suffer for it. Sometimes, it's the light touch that works best for fantastic literature. Here is the example.
With her bare and unadorned language, Okorafor speaks of complex and often brutal subject matters; genocide, weaponized rape, alienation, she is unflinching towards all. But it is never at odds with her story-telling and such subject matter is always respected. Perhaps that is what I most appreciate about this work; that she describes things that other authors, especially in the speculative fiction realm, don't dare to touch. She does it concisely and without fear.
Where some writers in the genre may extrapolate and over-do the more horrible scenes for the sake of shock value, Okarafor simply says what needs to be said. That she does this and still manages to suffuse the story with such warmth, magic (juju) and hope is amazing. That she does so without flinching from the often brutal subject matter is a mark of her maturity and her talent.
The story itself is set in a post-apocalyptic Africa and is rife with both the fantastic and the everyday. In one of the most memorable scenes, a whole village of people travel inside the eye of an enormous sandstorm. Coolest imagery in the book.
One thing that is constantly explored in the novel is prejudice. Onyesonwu is a child of rape, an Ewu, and is marked by this by the way she looks, with sand-colored skin and eyes like a desert cat’s. In the culture of the novel, tradition dictates that children born of violence will be violent themselves. Much of the tension in the story revolves around this mixture of fate and free-will that Onyesonwu must navigate. Does she allow herself to be the thing that most see her as, as savage and grotesque? Or does she exercise her own will in forming herself into what she desires? And what about when these things intersect? Adding to this theme of genetic fate and free-will is the fact that she is also Eshu, a shape-shifter. She very literally can make herself into what she wants. But as with all juju, there are consequences for everything.
This novel is both poignant and hard to put down. (No one can accuse this work of speculative fiction to be mere escapism!) Both shocking and beautiful, Okorafor creates a world that is fixed directly to a concern for humanity, and for everything that it's capable of.