Nnedi Okorafor's Death of the Author is a book I admired more and more as I read it. It isn't a flawless novel—in fact, I think some of its biggest ideas are also where it stumbles—but it completely won me over by the second half.
My first impression wasn't especially positive. I wasn't particularly impressed with the prose, and there were even a few passages where the writing made me wince a little. But the novel has one enormous strength: Zelu herself. She's a fascinating protagonist—stubborn, rebellious, talented, and often frustrating. And watching her navigate sudden literary success kept me turning pages. Somewhere around the halfway point I stopped reading casually and started devouring the book.
I also loved the novel's structure as a story about an author writing a story. The "rags to riches" arc of Zelu's career is compelling, and I enjoyed seeing how overnight success reshapes every aspect of her life.
One of the book's bravest choices is its portrayal of Zelu's family. Given that she's disabled and comes from a close-knit Nigerian family, it would have been easy to write them as endlessly loving and supportive. Instead, they're often dismissive, controlling, and outright cruel. They bully her, undermine her, and rarely treat her as an equal. It feels uncomfortable because it refuses to idealize family, and I appreciated Okorafor's willingness to go there.
Ironically, though, that storyline is also where I felt the novel fell short. The conflict with her family feels like the emotional heart of the book, but it never really reaches a satisfying resolution. Their attitude seems to shift from deeply critical to broadly supportive without enough genuine reconciliation. I had a similar reaction to Zelu's romance with Msizi. The relationship begins in an unhealthy place, but by the end we're largely asked to accept that they're deeply in love. Both arcs felt rushed compared to the amount of emotional weight they carry.
I also wondered whether we're meant to view Zelu as an unreliable narrator of her own life. At times she seems to see herself in ways that contradict what we're shown. She insists companionship isn't really possible for her, yet she repeatedly finds romantic and sexual partners with relative ease. She craves recognition as a writer, but once she acquires an enormous fanbase she seems almost incapable of acknowledging that admiration. Those contradictions could be intentional, but the novel never quite convinced me what it wanted me to take from them.
Some aspects of Zelu's rise to fame also felt surprisingly formulaic. She becomes a literary sensation, attracts the attention of an Elon Musk-esque billionaire, lands a movie adaptation, then gets cancelled in a very contemporary internet controversy. I kept wondering practical things: did nobody give this suddenly famous author media training before sending her onto national television? Did she not have a publicist or social media team helping her navigate this level of scrutiny? The beats of her celebrity felt familiar enough that I started anticipating them.
The excerpts from Zelu's novel, while central to the structure, didn't entirely work for me either. Part of the problem is that Zelu herself doesn't seem particularly enthusiastic about her own work, which subtly made me skeptical of it too. But there's also the unavoidable challenge of the premise: we're constantly told this manuscript is a once-in-a-generation masterpiece that changes literature forever. That's an almost impossible standard for any fictional book to meet, and while the robot story was interesting, it never felt revolutionary enough to justify the almost mythical reputation it earns.
I was even less convinced by the interview chapters scattered throughout the novel. These flash-forwards, where people discuss Zelu from some unknown point in the future, mostly telegraph that something terrible is going to happen. Rather than building suspense, they undercut it, and I never felt they added enough insight to justify interrupting the main narrative.
Then there's the ending. >!My reading is that we're not ultimately meant to question which story is "real." Instead, I think we're meant to believe that Zelu's story is the reality, while Ankara has written a fictionalized version of Zelu's life—a book we never actually read. It's an ambitious metafictional twist, but I'm not convinced it fully lands. The final convergence of Ankara's story and Zelu's feels somewhat contrived, and while I sensed the novel reaching for a profound statement about authorship, creation, and identity, I wasn't sure those ideas ultimately came together in a satisfying way.!<
I will admit, I was a little surprised this novel was nominated for a Hugo. Not just because of the issues above, but because it never really felt like science fiction to me. It reads much more like literary fiction with a light dusting of near-future technology.
Despite all of those criticisms, I genuinely enjoyed reading Death of the Author. Zelu is an unforgettable protagonist, and once the novel found its momentum I could hardly put it down. Even where I think the book misses, it's missing while attempting something ambitious and unusual. It's messy, thought-provoking, occasionally frustrating, and ultimately memorable.
Sometimes a book doesn't completely land, yet you can't stop thinking about it afterward. Death of the Author is one of those books.