A 2021 Hugo Award Finalist! A 2021 Nebula Award Finalist! A 2021 Locus Award Finalist! A 2021 World Fantasy Award Finalist! Winner of the 2020 New England Book Award for Fiction! Winner of an 2021 ALA Alex Award! Winner of the 2021 AABMC Literary Award! A 2021 Ignyte Award Finalist! Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Best Outstanding Work of Literary Fiction A Most Anticipated in … Finalist!
Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Best Outstanding Work of Literary Fiction
A Most Anticipated in 2020 Pick for Book Riot | Buzzfeed | Paste | WBUR
Named a Best of 2020 Pick for NPR | Wired | Book Riot | Publishers Weekly | NYPL | The Austen Chronicle | Kobo | Google Play | Powell’s Books | Den of Geek
“Riot Baby, Onyebuchi’s first novel for adults, is as much the story of Ella and her brother, Kevin, as it is the story of black pain in America, of the extent and lineage of police brutality, racism and injustice in this country, written in prose as searing and precise as hot diamonds.”–The New York Times
“Riot Baby bursts at the seams of story with so much fire, passion and power that in the end it turns what we call a narrative into something different altogether.”–Marlon James
Ella has a Thing. She sees a classmate grow up to become a caring nurse. A neighbor’s son murdered in a drive-by shooting. Things that haven’t happened yet. Kev, born while Los Angeles burned around them, wants to protect his sister from a power that could destroy her. But when Kev is incarcerated, Ella must decide what it means to watch her brother suffer while holding the ability to wreck cities in her hands.
Rooted in the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is as much an intimate family story as a global dystopian narrative. It burns fearlessly toward revolution and has quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience.
Ella and Kev are both shockingly human and immeasurably powerful. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by racism. Their futures might alter the world.
At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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Riot Baby bursts at the seams of story with so much fire, passion and power that in the end it turns what we call a narrative into something different altogether.
Tochi Onyebuchi is, primarily, a generous world-builder. His journey into this is honed and sharpened with Riot Baby, which asks a reader to care deeply for the interior of its characters, and the fights they have taken on.
Onyebuchi welds a graphic novel sensibility to a searing look at structural inequity in America today. This isn’t Jack Womack or J.G. Ballard’s broken near future: it’s our own photorealistic broken present. Riot Baby is an important book.
Stunningly original, brutal, and electric. Onyebuchi’s prose scorches. It’s hard to put this book down, and when you do, it stays with you.
Read for 2021 Hugos
Overall Thoughts
The concept of this book is very interesting, told between a sister with powers and her brother who watches over her. It contains a lot of righteous anger, directed at justifiable targets. That said, this story covers so many time periods, so much injustice, and so many areas of societal concern, that I feel it doesn’t quite bring home the point it’s trying to make. I would have either read a shorter, more concise version, or had an entire book to flesh out the story more.
Plot
I think most of my issues with the story lay in this aspect. There are some jarring POV switches that take a bit to get used to, and jumps in time are not always clear. Some of the references were not completely clear to me, and the theme of the book jumped between exploring the sister, Ella’s powers, and following the brother, Kevin’s journey through his life, including time in prison. I wanted just a little bit more of one or the other, but as is, it didn’t completely gel for me.
Setting
The setting is largely contemporary, but transitions between the 80’s, 90’s 2000’s and even slightly into the future (I think). There are a lot of descriptions of prison life which are quite eye opening, especially given the events of 2020, and there are many thought-provoking descriptions of how inmates are treated.
Character
This is, to me, the most compelling part of the story. Ella and Kevin each have their own ambitions and journeys, and this is what pulled me through the story, even when I didn’t fully understand some of the events. Learning about how their lives unfold was the best part of this book, seeing how their determination and ambition fuel their struggle for their goals.
A contemporary magical look at the school to prison complex and a futuristic look into what could happen if we don’t stop it.
It’s also a short read and unputdownable. I read it in one sitting! If you like the 13th documentary, definitely try this!
I needed more. I liked the story but I didn’t connect very much with Ella and I wanted to. I have questions that didn’t get answered. I enjoyed the story and loved the setting. The narration was great.
https://mistyaquavenatus.com/2020/02/29/why-you-need-to-read-riot-baby
Riot Baby was a book that I immediately fell in love with and only felt more rewarded by as its pages went on. By the end of the first chapter, I was Googling Tochi Onyebuchi to find out what else he’d written, adding his books to my wishlist for future purchases and making sure his name stuck in my mind. Halfway through chapter three, I was back to Googling the author, wanting to read the various interviews he’s been giving to help publicize this Tor release and to learn more about him. By the end of Riot Baby, I felt both angry and hopeful, and convinced I’d just found a new favorite author and an incredible new book to gush over and recommend to everybody.
What makes Onyebuchi’s latest so amazing is its very particular viewpoint and its examination — and condemnation — of modern day America. This is a dystopian novel, centered largely around the present day, and with only some brief detours into a near-future, as seen through the eyes of young black siblings. Kevin was born in 1992 just as Los Angeles was being consumed by riots following the non-guilty verdict awarded to the police officers following the brutal beating of Rodney King. His older sister, Ella, is gifted with unnatural powers that can make her either a savior or a horror, or perhaps both simultaneously.
In an interview with Nerd Daily, Onyebuchi credits the birth of this book with his inability to find a Magneto Was Right t-shirt, and that’s as succinct an elevator pitch as this book needs! Riot Baby is grounded very much in the black experience in America, with its major touchstones being the violent, incendiary events that highlight the present-day police state African Americans live in. From the LA Riots to the police massacre of Sean Bell, Onyebuchi has crafted a violent, dangerous tale where any missteps or incursions by Otherness are met with an outsized, excessive use of force and bloody assault as response, in an attempt to not just quell but destroy the black community.
It’s hard to argue against Onyebuchi’s viewpoint, and it highlights a very real struggle in black America, one rife with systemic institutionalized racism, an America where blacks are killed at disproportionately higher rates by police, particularly if unarmed, for various crimes like reading a book in their car, or for changing a flat tire, or for living in their own apartment, or for talking on a cell phone in their back yard, or for being disabled, or, or, or, or, or, or…. The list goes on and on, highlighting the concept of Two Americas in articulate, intelligent, and depressingly real detail.
Some will no doubt ignore Riot Baby for being “too political,” which is often code for “too real” or “too liberal” or “too progressive,” and they’ll be doing themselves a real disservice. Yes, Riot Baby is real, despite Ella’s powers and despite Onyebuchi’s much too-real near-future utilization of drone and bioinformatics and algorithmically-driven technology by police forces to maintain the status quo of oppressive inequality and help keep people afraid. Too political? Too real? Too damn right it is! And, frankly, when it comes to books like this, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Riot Baby is righteously angry and necessary reading. It’s also the first real Must Have title of 2020, and an early contender for best of the year in my mind. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go Google Tochi Onyebuchi again and see if his next book has a release date yet.
Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby is thrilling and harrowing in the tradition of Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Onyebuchi has woven a story as uplifting as it is heartbreaking, an epic ode to the future and past, tiny acts of resistance, love, and the wild unstoppable sweep of revolution.
Riot Baby is the burning embers of a revolution… the quiet rage of generations of people who have been told they are lesser than others. It’s the flash of accelerant in a genre that needs the burn.
Onyebuchi’s adult debut is a stunningly, vitally harrowing story and genre at its very best.
Powerful. Furious. Riot Baby carries the full weight of black American fury and grief, woven together with a masterful story of two siblings and a magic so powerful it will change the face of everything they know.