The pidgin English dialect was like listening to an amped-up Jar Jar Binks.
And, as much as I loved the voice actors, some of their accent were incomprehensible to me. Also, the author over-relies on the device of having many of her characters coincidentally know other characters who are important to the story. The central plot, which concerned the main characters' mission to get through the chaos to meet up with Nigeria's ailing president, gets a little tedious in its one-thing-after-another action overload. It's not that there weren't annoyances, though. Audiobook narrators, Adjoa Andoh and Ben Onwukwe, who do an astonishing range of accents, demonstrate just how much the spoken-word experience can enhance a book. Okorafor's creativity especially shines in the sequences devoted to animals changed by the aliens' energies. I very much enjoyed the colorful writing and the honesty about Nigeria's conflicted, multifaceted personality that emerged in the book's many short vignettes, each from the perspective of a different denizen of the city. The aliens, it seems, have awakened old spirits and powers lurking just beneath the skin of Lagos (including a man-eating road!). There are some strong mystical elements to the story, which lend it, at times, a magic realist flavor reminiscent of Salman Rushdie. This definitely isn't conventional sci-fi. The aliens, like gods, can be benevolent in their way, but also seem to be judging humanity and are dangerous when provoked.
Meanwhile, the strange events unleash religious fervor, rioting, and other chaos throughout Lagos. Instead, Adaora conducts a few tests, footage ends up on the internet, and different parties, from a charlatan witch-hunting preacher to some enterprising kidnappers to a unit of trigger-happy soldiers, converge on the scene. At this point, had the story been set in the US, the government would have swooped in, set up a tight military cordon and whisked away the visitor. A wave pulls them all into the water, and some time later, they return with a fourth individual, an ambassador from the aliens who has taken human form. For reasons that don't become clear until later, three people, strangers to each other, a marine biologist named Adaora, a popular Ghanaian rapper named Anthony, and a soldier named Agu, are attracted to the beach. Immediately, their technology, which is advanced to the point of near-magic, begins to wreak changes on the local marine life. Here, when aliens come to set up a new home on Earth, they don't pick New York, London, or Tokyo, but land their ship in the ocean near Lagos, Nigeria, flooding the coast. Lagoon, her most recent work, shows her strengthening her skills as a writer and storyteller. I enjoyed 2010's post-apocalypse coming-of-age, Who Fears Death, though I found the plot a little disjointed. There aren't a lot of sci-fi/fantasy writers who use Africa as a primary setting, but Nnedi Okorafor is a noteworthy voice in this small subgenre.
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