This tale moves beyond the boom-bang, boring theology of so many fantasies-and, in the process, creates, almost griotlike, a paean to an emerging black legendĪgainst the backdrop of World War II, four young women codebreakers put their minds together to find a serial killer. Author Onyebuchi’s novel creates his in the good old-fashioned way: the slow, loving construction of the mundane and the miraculous, building a world that is both completely new and instantly recognizable. “Epic” is an overused term to describe how magnificent someone or something is.
He must navigate these in the midst of a political plot, a burgeoning star-crossed love, and forgiveness for the sins he does not commit. What makes Taj extraordinary is the tensions he holds: his blasé awareness of his exalted status as the best aki, even as the townspeople both shun yet exploit him and his chosen family of sin-eaters his adolescent swagger coupled with the big-brotherly protectiveness he has for the crew of akis and, as the story proceeds, his increasing responsibility to train them his natural skepticism of the theology that guides Kos even as he performs the very act that allows the theology-and Kos itself-to exist. This really isn’t his most remarkable trait, however, even as he ingests greater and greater sins of the Kaya, the brown-skinned royal family ruling the land of Kos. Taj, the black teenage narrator of Onyebuchi’s debut, is an aki, or sin-eater-meaning that he literally consumes the exorcised transgressions of others, usually in the forms of inky-colored animal-shaped phantasms called inisisas that reappear as black tattoos on the akis’ “red skin, brown skin.” A beautifully written work on a gritty subject. Even if it was a pill-induced hallucinatory encounter, Dylan comes away with a resolve to make a small step for himself and is more open to the help some are ready to give. Perched on the edge of a sink, Einstein challenges Dylan’s theories and nudges Dylan toward a new theory of himself. In the coming weeks, Dylan reads up on Einstein and, in a scene that would seem incongruous but that works perfectly to change pace and tone, he encounters Einstein in the library’s washroom. Hanging out at the library and grabbing the first book within reach to make it look like he’s there to read, Dylan becomes acquainted with Albert Einstein, who also had a number of theories. Not that he’s on the street by choice his mom booted him out and he’s never seen his father. Dylan has developed plenty of theories about his life on the streets: Every fourth person will give him money no one gives him something for nothing all relatives suck.
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