Riot Baby

 By: Tochi Onyebuchi

Location: FIC ONY

Genre: Fantasy. Sci Fi, Fiction

Stirring, poignant & powerful!

All we can do is the work. I recognize it’s not enough to preach free love. We have to combat free hate as well. 

"Riot Baby bursts at the seams of story with so much fire, passion and power that in the end it turns what we call a narrative into something different altogether."—Marlon James

Rooted in foundational loss and the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is both a global dystopian narrative an intimate family story with quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience.

Ella and Kev are brother and sister, both gifted with extraordinary power. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by structural racism and brutality. Their futures might alter the world. When Kev is incarcerated for the crime of being a young black man in America, Ella—through visits both mundane and supernatural—tries to show him the way to a revolution that could burn it all down.

Review by Jenna- Goodreads

Riot Baby, though short, is powerful. It is a book that punches you in the gut with each of its 174 pages. 

It is the story of siblings Ella and Kev and how structural racism defines their lives, beginning in childhood. Kev is the Riot Baby, born during the LA riots of 1992, Ella the sister with mysterious powers. Their childhood is fraught with danger, and violence is an everyday affair. Somehow they survive into adulthood, when Kev is unjustly arrested and incarcerated, as so many young black men are in America.

The story fluctuates between Kev's experiences and Ella's. Ella too is incarcerated, trapped in the justifiable anger that consumes her. All her life she's had visions, and through them witnesses countless acts of police brutality against Black people. She also witnesses their oppression countless times in her everyday life.

My only problem with this book is that at times it moved around too much and many times it wasn't immediately clear if the scenario was actually happening or was a vision. Reality would become jumbled. Were we in the past, present, or future?

In passionate and at times poetic prose, Riot Baby reminds us of the many injustices and atrocities Black people face every day in America, a country that is steeped in structural and cultural racism. It is not a book to read if you want to cover your eyes, comfort yourself, and insist we live in post-racial times. 

The book ultimately leaves us with a glimmer of hope that things can get better and eventually will. It points out however, that change cannot happen if people remain silent. Riot Baby, though fiction, is a call to action on the part of everyone who cares.