TOTAL READING TIME: 1 hour, 14 minutes.
I recently heard that this book series has been adapted into a TV show on the BBC. The trailer was intriguing so I thought I'd read at least the first book from the series. I found a copy of the graphic novel adaptation on Depop--I needed something quick because I have been experiencing the worst slump lately, so I didn't think there was any harm in reading the graphic novel before the actual novel.
I respect the fact that this series was written by a Black woman, so this wasn't a case of a non-Black author not staying in their lane and just fucking everything up... but this book was kind of dumb. I don't understand why this book received the critical acclaim that it did. It's classified as a 'sci-fi/dystopian' novel but there was very little world-building. As an alternate history novel there were a lot of gaps with how things in this particular world worked as well.
First, it's been implied that people from Africa colonized Europe, which is why white Europeans are oppressed in the first place. But what reason would Africans have to colonize Europe when Africa is abundant with natural resources, which is the reason why real-life Europeans colonized the continent in the first place? What could Africans possibly want in Europe?
Second, why would the noughts (white people) still have real-life western names if they were colonized by Africans? Why wouldn't they have names rooted in African cultures? Hell, why would the BLACK characters still have western names? Why were they wearing western clothes?
And LASTLY, what the fuck happened to the other races in the world? East Asians, Southeast Asians, South Asians, Middle Eastern people, Indigenous people... why were there no characters that belonged to other races? What happened to them? Is this book set in a world where there are only Black and white people? If other races existed, where did they fall in this book's 'oppression' binary? Were they oppressed by the crosses too or were they allies and only the noughts were oppressed?
My main problem with this book, however, is how it tried to portray the noughts' oppression. So we've established the fact that this book is about an alternate universe where Black people are the oppressors and it's white people being oppressed. Callum's family, particularly his dad and older brother, were depicted as members of a rebel militia, going so far as to planting a bomb at a local shopping centre and killing 7 people as a result.
To me, I just see this as pointless. Because newsflash: white people in real life already do that. There are subsets of white people who do think they're being oppressed by Black people/people of colour and think that white genocide is real. Domestic terrorists acting on white supremacy have killed Black people before. So I don't understand the point of depicting the white characters the way this book has as a means of asking the audience "omg what if the roles were reversed and this happened?" because it already DOES happen in real life. I thought it was kinda dumb that the Liberation Militia in the book was supposed to be an analogy for... the Black Panther Party? Because white nationalist militias are already a thing.
I dunno. Maybe I'm missing something. It is a series so maybe more details are explained in the later books. But based just on the premise and the concept and how it was all executed, it just wasn't for me.