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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.
"Urgent, brutal... . Onyebuchi's unexpectedly hopeful ending is just as powerful as his unflinching, heartbreaking depictions of racism and cruelty. This staggering story is political speculative fiction at its finest." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Onyebuchi sheds light on a world of harsh familiarity and fantastical originality with his incredible worldbuilding and devastating prose. Stark, sharp, and brutal, this story will burn in readers' minds long after the last page." ―Library Journal (starred review)
"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
This information about Riot Baby was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of Goliath, a Locus Award and Dragon Award finalist, the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African, its sequel, Crown of Thunder, and War Girls. His novella Riot Baby, a finalist for the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, the Ignyte, and the NAACP Image Awards, won the New England Book Award for Fiction and an ALA Alex Award. He holds a B.A. from Yale, a M.F.A. in screenwriting from the Tisch School for the Arts, a Master's degree in droit économique from Sciences Po, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School.
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