The best and most poignant dystopian novels share so many details with the world that we know that it can be difficult to immediately notice what details are different. Some of those details are essential fabrics in the story to highlight what a dangerous path we may be (or are) heading down in the real world. In Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby, the conflict is driven by race and the title gets its name from one of the protagonists, Kevin Jackson, who is born in LA on the day the city broke out in riots after the police officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted. With a beginning like that, it is clear the story will have some powerful things to say.
Ella has a Thing. She sees a classmate grow up to become a caring nurse. A neighbor’s son murdered in a drive-by shooting. Things that haven’t happened yet. Kev, born while Los Angeles burned around them, wants to protect his sister from a power that could destroy her. But when Kev is incarcerated, Ella must decide what it means to watch her brother suffer while holding the ability to wreck cities in her hands.
Rooted in the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is as much an intimate family story as a global dystopian narrative. It burns fearlessly toward revolution and has quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience.
Ella and Kev are both shockingly human and immeasurably powerful. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by racism. Their futures might alter the world.
Kevin shares the spotlight as protagonist with his sister, Ella who has “a thing” or abilities that set her apart from everyday people. Of course, Ella needs to keep this “thing” hidden or she’d have an even bigger target on her back than she already does by simply being black person in America. Her brother shares that “target,” which lands Kevin in jail for no real reason other than the color of his skin. Ella and Kevin are able to keep contact due to her Things even when Ella doesn’t visit Kevin in prison.
The story is less about their abilities but rather how Onyebuchi uses their abilities as a lens to focus on the inequalities in the world, how being different from other people can illicit fear, how being different from your family can drive you away from them. Riot Baby is about how harrowing it is, and how much worse it could potentially be, in a world where racial tensions seem to only increase, where those racial prejudices make the world worse.
What is perhaps most powerful about Onyebuchi’s story is the authenticity. It felt intensely real, from the issues of racism Onyebuchi highlights in the story, to the way the characters speak, to the way they emote. Kev’s journey through the story feels all too real given the times in which we live, times where innocent young black men in America are harassed by police as a matter of course. What makes this story feel so real is also what makes it so harrowing.
I was lucky enough to hear Tochi speak at New York Comic Con in 2019, and briefly chat with him. I was immediately drawn in by his enthusiasm for the genre and the fun & smart contributions he made to the panels on which he was a member. That enthusiasm transfers to his voice as a storyteller.
I feel like Riot Baby is a story that will do very well on multiple readings. It is a prophetic, harrowing, and at times uplifting story. At barely 170 pages, Riot Baby is potent and impressive.
Recommended
© 2020 Rob H. Bedford
Hardcover | 176 Pages
Tor.com Publishing Books | January 2020
https://duncanmhamilton.com/
Excerpt: https://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9781250306739
Review Copy courtesy of the Publisher
