Second paragraph of third chapter:
Malik watched. “You address me as Ataba and yet you disrespect my rules,” he said.
It just seemed to me a slightly above average YA novel, and we never learn the basis for the colourful rain. You can get it here.
More detail: I’m all for Afrofuturism, but IMHO this just isn’t a very good book. It’s a coming-of-age story where a young black woman overcomes (some of) the sources of her people’s historic oppression and learns many important things about life. Mostly in the last fifty pages.
The worldbuilding is vestigial – I got more info from the back cover about the set-up than I did in the first hundred pages. I can see where the author is going with the notion that this is a culture where the blacker your skin is, the more beautiful you are considered to be, but it seems to me that this misses an important point about not judging people by beauty in the first place; and the protagonist’s struggle to overcome disfiguring scars is rather problematic.
In addition, on page 103, eight high-profile prisoners escape by simply walking out of a room in plain sight of their captors and stealing a nearby spaceship. I’m sorry, this is ridiculous.
In addition, I am bothered by the uses of “Mecca”. The crucial serum is given this name by a character who says (p 101) that “It’s a term I heard in a viewer show about Earth. It means the promise of something good.” Well, it doesn’t really, but I’d have been happy to let that slip if we didn’t have the (white) Toth race presented on p. 163 with the comment “they allowed expatriates and had turned their world into an interplanetary mecca”. This bothered me for a couple of reasons:
1) it’s jarring that the characters in the book have only the haziest idea about the real Mecca, but the omniscient narrator knows all about it as a metaphor.
2) having said that, if you describe a place as a “Mecca”, in general you reference a common activity or interest for the people visiting there (“The Vanilla Bar in Manchester is the Lesbian Mecca of the North”, Ta-Nehisi Coates says “my only Mecca was, is, and shall always be Howard University”). But here we are given no such sense of the Toth world being a centre of anything other than travel.
In addition, the asteroid where much of the second half of the book takes place is equipped with a mild atmosphere and running water, like the asteroids in Le Petit Prince. In reality, asteroids have vestigial or no atmosphere and very low gravity. Again, if it was a better book overall I’d stretch a point here, but I’m not feeling merciful.
In addition,”A plea gushed from her mouth” (p. 201). Oh come on.
I appreciate that it’s the author’s first novel, and having read up on her background I can see where she is coming from and why she made some of the choices that she did. I don’t think it’s taking the piss. But I don’t feel that Where it Rains in Color really is up to the mark.
