I think this book—well, series—is running up against my inherent dislike of the Bildungsroman as a genre. I’m really enjoying the existence of this kind of coming of age story being expanded beyond Huck Finn and Pip and I like it better when I don’t want to sock the main character in the jaw for 400 pages, but I feel like the Bildungsroman doesn’t have enough space for the world beyond the character. It’s not that stories about characters, especially those who don’t change the world, are boring...it’s that I have a hard time not wanting to know more about Binti in relation to her worlds.
I’m still looking forward to the third novella, mostly because I want to know more about the world. And because I need to know if Binti will be okay and emotionally healthy.
This is the real problem with the Bildungsroman as a genre: I can’t stop reading it because I’m too invested in the characters, but the experience of reading it is not as fun as other books.