I am so torn by this book.

On the one hand, I really liked the structure and the themes and the way it developed, and the final twist did EXACTLY what it was meant to.

On the other hand… I did not particularly enjoy the writing itself.

The novel’s structure comprises three parts: sometimes we’re following Zelu’s life as she navigates being Nigerian-American, and a paraplegic, and unemployed, and a struggling author. Sometimes we get interviews with people in Zelu’s life, from later in time than the bit we’re reading of Zelu’s life. And sometimes we’re reading the science fiction novel that Zelu writes pretty early on in the book, which becomes a phenomenon: it’s about the robots who are left on Earth after the humans are gone (died?), and whether the embodied can coexist with the disembodied. So, for me, structure: big tick. This way of telling a story, and the story itself, are fantastic.

Themes? Well, they’re kind of obvious from the above paragraph, aren’t they. Zelu is impacted by multiple structural inequalities; she rages against them, and the way she does so informs a lot of the novel. Okorafor is doing A LOT with ideas of AI, both in Zelu’s novel and her life. There’s an enormous amount to unpack around questions of identity (for immigrants, the way people view those with disabilities, patriarchy, etc etc). Okorafor has a deft hand – the novel is in no way preachy, but it was also (at least for me) impossible to avoid thinking about the ideas. And I mean that in a good way.

And then there’s the reference to Roland Barthes’ essay, of course. That the author is just another reader when it comes to interpreting a text. You don’t need to have read his piece, or even have heard of it, to understand the novel, but it’s certainly another level if you have.

And yet. I did not especially enjoy the novel, on a word or sentence level. Rusted Robots, Zelu’s novel, is not a novel I would rate by itself – is that part of the point? I have no idea. Perhaps I am simply not connecting with Okorafor’s style – which is fine! There are plenty of novels that other people hate and I love! But it makes me sad, because I wanted to love this book a lot, and I cannot in all honesty say that I did. I did not find the reading experience a transportive one.