Noor

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For instance, we have a young woman who had her damaged organs and limbs replaced with mechanical, computerized parts. Ok, very cool. But, when her brain suddenly connects with the internet because of all these cyber parts, there is no explanation of how this happened.

The story building was seamless. The details here and there would form a grin on my face. Like, the seven up bottles, S-i-n-g-e-r sewing machine (it is still printed like this today!), ordinary life of a Pakistani family, of a Pakistani woman- all these are crafted with accuracy you wouldn’t find much in English books. You can almost picture the household, hear the Urdu words falling from their mouths. And the accurate details of then East Pakistan and now Bangladesh left wider grins on my face. On a dozing afternoon when the winter is merging into the long lasting summer of my land, I have finished reading Noor. Russia has invaded Ukraine the previous day and my soil is free, once which was deep red.This is the first work I read by Nnedi Okorafor. The story is set in a futuristic Nigeria, and the future envisioned by Okorafor is a realistic one I can see happening quite easily. The main themes covered in this work are how foreign powers encroach upon the local resources of less wealthy countries, desecrating the nation in the process while swelling their bank accounts. The organization that is the main power here, Ultimate Corp, sells its products for a price cheaper than the Nigerian market itself, and the citizens themselves feed into an organization that does harm to their country, because the momentary comforts their products give are effective tranquilizers. The theme explored here is a powerful one, and I enjoyed reading it. Contributing to the advancement and development of Arab societies and spreading culture and awareness On the fourth day he felt like a mercenary.....In the end he'd fought and killed for an unremarkable reason : to save himself.' Great storytelling; great science fiction; great interpersonal relationships. The reader’s story starts when it does for AO. The development is well foreshadowed without being too obvious. The climax is simultaneously a surprise and inevitable. Good job.

Sorayya is the author of We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir (2022), which she wrote after her mother’s death, and three novels, Noor (2004), Five Queen’s Road (2009), and City of Spies (2015), which won Best International Fiction Award at the Sharjah Book Fair (2016). The novel started slow with several interleaving stories-within-stories exposing the setting. I didn’t buy into the technological projections like wireless energy transfer over large distances or the superhuman interactions with those AIs. They gave the novel a touch of Fantasy, so don’t expect Hard SF here. Similarly, the Red Eye cyclone is more a fairy tale than dystopian CliFi. We have to give the author a lot of room to draw her setting.Arab countries will not prosper and stabilize as long as the Zionist entity exists within the body of the Arab nation. Another complaint is that there are a couple chapters written in italics. This is another thing I've come across in more than a couple newer books. Do authors or publishers or whoever makes this decision no longer read The Elements of Style? Italicized words are hard on the eyes and should be used sparingly and not for more than a couple words or a phrase at a time.

It's an okay enough story, maybe, but I could have done without the romance. It added little and seemed like filler. It would have been better if the author had instead explored the technology instead of relying on insta-love to move the story. Simultaneously, Noor's distinguished abilities, supernatural in nature, are still so realistic and believable. The reader is compelled to unravel the mystery of her deeper than usual insight into the life of her family members through their past, present and future. I also wasn't a fan of how the plot abruptly jumped around a bit when it came to action or big reveals. It felt like we were going somewhere and then everything took a very sharp turn to some other place within a few lines. It was very jarring during some chapters and it took me out of the story.I have to skip lengthy sections of books written in italics and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Is it necessary to write that way?? To me, it says the author is not sure of their ability to convey what they intend and/or they think the reader is stupid. As a fan of Nnedi Okorafor, I was very excited to get a chance to read her latest work of science-fiction, Noor. We meet AO, who goes by the initials of her given name as well as the moniker she’s adopted for herself, Artifical Organism, as she’s shopping in a Nigerian market. After a bloody run-in turns her into a target then a fugitive, AO flees her home for the desert in hopes of avoiding capture. There she meets a lone herdsman and his two cows, before deciding to embark into the Red Eye together. I didn’t like the main protagonist much. Her tendency to suicide put me off, as did some other of her (non-) reactions. Add to that many wooden dialogs and sometimes confusing narrative structure.