Released May 11, 2021 

 

Son of the Storm 

By. Suyi Davies Okungbowa 

Orbit Books 

P. 545 

Format: eArc 

Rating: ** 

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I received an e-arc from @Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. 

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**Spoilers Below - I tried to be as vague as possible but it couldn’t be helped** 

 

I want to start by saying that I really, really, really wanted to love this book. The cover is probably the best cover to come out this year. The premise of the book is amazing. It should have been epic. . . But as you can see from my rating I did not find it so. 

 

Son of the Storms looks at an empire in pre-colonial West Africa. Bassa is the empire’s capital. It was once an empire to be feared, but now it has created its own history that it hides behind and punishes anyone who would dare think differently. Danso is bi-racial. His father conceived him with a yellow skinned islander that are now gone, their islands have sunk into the sea. Danso has doesn’t fit into his society’s cast system. He is too light skinned to be upper class, yet he his intelligence landed him a spot at the elite university. 

 

Intriguing right? Like I said, I wanted to love this book. It should have been amazing. 

 

My issue mainly came with gender representation in this book. There are two main female main characters, both were described by mensuration for the first half of the book. One female character’s menstrual cycle lasted for over six days while she was unconscious and seriously hurt. Then the second female character had her menstrual cycle mentioned also. WTF - women do more than bleed. 

 

Then there is a pregnancy mentioned in the book. This pregnancy happened to one of the characters above. The character was “late” even though they conceived less than a week prior. Not only did they know they were pregnant a few days after a missed period, every other character figured it out also. Then there was an entire plot line around this collection of cells - because a simple internet search would have shown that the fetus would not have even developed organs - but hey lets allow it to be a conducted for magic. The entire span of this book took place within a few weeks, and the child was conceived during that time period. 

 

There is also a Non-Binary character. I would usually be all over this. Except that this character did not make sense. There is a character that had to hide that he could not conceive children because he feared for his life. A main tenet of Bassa culture is procreation. Yet there was no cultural issue with a gender divergent character? Then this character mostly killed things and had sex. This book made me realize that maybe sometimes no rep is good rep. 

 

The story itself is slow. There are awkward sections that are described from the weirdest point of views which minimizes how the reader connects to certain critical scenes. I mean we loose one of the main characters, but the current narrator ends up blacking out while it happens. It made me disconnect from the story and did not allow me to properly morn the character.