★★☆☆☆ Why you act like that, Onyeka?

Onyeka and the Rise of the Rebels

Tọlá Okogwu

** spoiler alert **

I am a Star Trek fan. One of the burdens we Star Trek fans bear is the many episodes in which the entire plot is set in motion by one of the supposedly intelligent and competent officers of the Enterprise committing some boneheaded act that produces a crisis that the crew of the Enterprise then spends the entire episode trying to fix.

I'm not saying that Onyeka and the Rise of the Rebels is like that. I say only that if Onyeka didn't make a lot of puzzling and injudicious choices, the novel would be much shorter.

For example (spoiler coming), near the end of the book Dr Dòyìnbó kidnaps Onyeka's best friend Cheyenne from England in order to coerce Onyeka to join him. Onyeka and Ada hare off on their own to rescue Chey. They find where Dòyìnbó has her imprisoned. There are two glass-walled cells. In one of these an ally of theirs is imprisoned. Onyeka tries to break him out, but even her magic hair just bounces off the reinforced glass. Then, in the other cell she sees Chey. The door of this cell is open. Does Onyeka, who knows perfectly well that Dòyìnbó wants to capture her, think "That looks a lot like a baited trap"? No, she does not, She and Ada dive into Chey's cell through the open door, which snaps shut, trapping them.

This particular act of ill judgement is resolved almost immediately when Onyeka's family and friends show up and release her. Thus the narrative effect is to make the coming of the family and friends more dramatic, at the expense of making the heroine of the book look not-very-smart. Not a good bargain, in my opinion.

Now to be fair, Tọlá Okogwu does have a purpose and explanation for some of Onyeka's earlier failures of judgment. Onyeka suffers from trust issues that cause her to make some bad choices. But from the reader's point of view, it is frustrating to read a story driven mostly by the heroine's bad judgment, however predicated.

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