Riot Baby

Author/narrator Tochi Onyebuchi portrays characters who personify the violent world they live in. Ella has special powers, including the ability to see things that haven't happened yet. When her brother, Kev, is imprisoned, she has to decide whether or not to use her powers to free him. Onyebuchi delivers the intensity of his plot in an unflinching style. His characters are animated and in-your-face, while at the same time caring in a tough-love sort of way. There are times when the listener wonders if the characters' troubles will ever get better, but Onyebuchi's narration offers hope. In the second half of the audiobook, his steady pace allows listeners to follow the details that bring this story to an unexpected, powerful close. T.E.C. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Starred review from November 11, 2019
Onyebuchi (War Girls) paints a grim, dystopian portrait of contemporary America shot through with elements of the supernatural in this urgent, brutal work. Ella Jackson and her baby brother, Kev, are both preternaturally gifted. The “Riot Baby,” Kev, is born in 1992 Los Angeles, just hours after the courts acquitted the cops that beat Rodney King and the city erupted in violence. As a teenager in New York, Kev is brutally assaulted by police and arrested for no crime but being black; he spends the next eight years incarcerated at Rikers. During this time, Ella visits him both in person and psychically, constantly using her powers to offer him glimpses of freedom and life outside the prison walls and lead him on a path toward a revolutionary future as, in the outside world, incidents of police brutality rise and their mother’s health fails. Onyebuchi’s unexpectedly hopeful ending is just as powerful as his unflinching, heartbreaking depictions of racism and cruelty. This staggering story is political speculative fiction at its finest.