Note: Riot Baby is published by Tor, an imprint of Macmillan. Macmillan has established a policy of embargoing its ebooks to libraries. It’s a policy that hurts authors, libraries, and readers, and the American Library Association is sponsoring an initiative to promote fair library ebook policies. You can support that initiative here!
Riot Baby is a primal scream of a novella, ranging through America’s racist history into a near-future version of the country that continues the climate emergency and militarization of the police.
Our protagonists are siblings Ella and Kev, both of whom are gifted — Ella more noticeably than Kev — with what they call a Thing, a special power whose limits and boundaries they do not fully understand. Kev was born during the riots that followed the acquittal of the officers who brutally beat up Rodney King, and he grows up in — well — this world. In the exact way these things are prone to happening, Kev ends up at Rikers Island, while Ella travels the nation, both of them experiencing and bearing witness to Black pain under a regime of American white supremacy.
Riot Baby is dizzying in its scope, ranging at speed through centuries of American history, from lynchings under Jim Crow to the racist spectacle of the Angola Prison Rodeo. “They called it Angola. In case you forgot it all comes back to Africa.” At times it can get overwhelming, but that’s, of course, the idea: White oppression of black Americans is foundational to this country, written into our constitution, and black free will — whether in the form of rebellions against slavery or protests after police shootings — has always been met with violence. Ella and Kev are practiced in witnessing and experiencing that violence. It has shaped their lives from their very first days.
Onyebuchi’s writing in this book is stunning. His evocation of American history, in all its messiness and filth, will blow you away. I don’t know what else to say about this book except that it sets a new standard for the subgenre of urban fantasy.1 The conclusion of Riot Baby is at once shocking and inevitable. Given what Ella and Kev have seen — which is our exact world, the one that every black American lives through — it’s impossible for them to land on anything but revolution.
Another note: I received this book as an ARC from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.
- I mean, I say this, but urban fantasy is really not my subgenre, so take this with a pinch of salt. I’ve read like… four urban fantasy novels total, and two of those were by one author. BUT EVEN SO. ↩