Najeeba, powerful witch and mother to the revolutionary Onyesonwu (the protagonist of author Nnedi Okorafor’s World Fantasy Award-winning Who Fears Death), continues her journey in the second installation of the She Who Knows trilogy. In the first novel, Najeeba relayed her past: her childhood as a salt miner and seller; her discovery of her spirit form, the fire lizard kponyungo; her survival after the massacre of her village and the brutal rape that resulted in her daughter, Onyesonwu. In One Way Witch, we meet Najeeba in her 40s, as she trains with the sorcerer Aro to fulfill her potential as a witch and processes the aftermath of Onyesonwu’s death.Â
With her final act, Onyesonwu changed the world and magically rewrote history: Genocide once plagued the Seven Rivers Kingdom and surrounding lands, with the Nurus enslaving and slaughtering the darker-skinned Okekes, but peace now reigns, blissful and—to Najeeba, at least—disorienting. As one of the few people who remembers the violence of the Before, Najeeba must grieve her beloved daughter and navigate living in a separate reality from everyone else in her village while fighting the dark forces that remain active despite Onyesonwu’s achievements.Â
As always, Okorafor’s prose is simple in execution but expansive and authoritative in the ideas it relays. Najeeba is a stubborn, self-possessed protagonist who is curious but acts with the wisdom of lived experiences. And Okorafor has crafted a surrounding network of characters who are a delight to revisit over multiple books, and are especially compelling for their constant evolution. Teachers become students, belief systems falter and disintegrate, enemies return for absolution, old hearts find new love. It is definitely recommended to read the prior books in the series before One Way Witch, beginning with Who Fears Death. But for devoted fans, One Way Witch is another Okorafor classic, a statement on politics, gender and history delivered as an unputdownable read.
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