Riot Baby

"Riot Baby is a lot of things: A dystopian nightmare that looks startlingly similar to real life, a street-side shot of magical realism, a brilliant work of political speculative fiction that uses rocketing language and the supernatural as means to interrogate American racism and the carceral state, and a story of black people with superpowers. Kevin is the “riot baby” of the title – born in Los Angeles in 1992, just as the cops who beat Rodney King are being let off. The story follows him and his sister Ella (touched with powers that allow her to see into multiple futures) through schools and streets and prison and beyond; through decades of worsening police violence and strict order that, from all the wrong angles, looks like peace. It is sharp, cruel, occasionally brutal, surprisingly hopeful, and Ella’s visions – her “Thing,” her power – offers a vision of an end to oppression that feels like true revolution."

"Oh, yeah. Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi, a Nigerian-American writer, is such a powerful, powerful book. It is amazing. It is, in some ways, a superhero story that literalizes power, powerlessness, and anger, and allows us to understand and view racial injustice in America in a way that I think few works have been able to do for me, at an emotional level. Tochi is an incredible writer. I’ve followed his writing for years, and it’s been amazing to see him grow and experiment, and try out different things. One of the things about Riot Baby that particularly amazed me is just the creativity and beauty that Tochi puts into using language. The characters have superpowers, and we’re talking about very spiritual concepts. So rather than just using a standard, conservative style to describe these experiences, Tochi chose to really experiment and stretch language, to describe and encompass experiences and sensations that we otherwise cannot experience. He embraces the limitations, as well as the strengths of the medium we’re working in. “To me, speculative fiction is generally the type of fiction that uses the technique of literalizing some aspect of reality that we usually speak of as metaphorical” Tochi, of course, is a very skilled screenwriter as well. But for Riot Baby , he chose to use experimental language in a lot of places, using prose to do things that film and TV cannot. I love novelists who embrace that aspect of prose writing, and make us think, and use language in ways that weren’t possible before, or that we hadn’t thought of. I just love this book. It’s wonderful. Oh, it’s inspiring. It really is. It makes you, as a writer, to want to do more, up your game, because it’s just so good."