I sadly had to DNF this one. I couldn't get on with the writing style and the depictions of violence against women were too extreme, with no reasonable justification I could see for having so much.

I love African diaspora inspired fantasy/dystopian ideas but this one was difficult to get through. I had to force myself to keep going and honestly, still can't say much about it as I didn't know where it was going half the time and couldn't take much in.

I had a really hard time getting into Sankofa and unfortunately couldn’t end up finishing this book.

The story really interested me but because of the violence and misuse of the female characters I just couldn’t continue.

However it was a powerful book and was well written (from what I did manage)

Unfortunately DNF'd, the explicit violence against women made it hard to stomach. I would say this is for other type of readers, or someone with less triggers.

i really enjoyed reading this book, it was a fun read with great characters. I enjoyed the plot of the book I think it was really entertaining.

I am sorry, I just couldn't get into this book. I had a lot of trouble reading it due to the writing style and couldn't continue it. I think the fact that English isn't my first language didn't help.
The story was promising so and I might try again at some point in my life.

First of all, I want to thank Netgalley for this ARC, but unfortunately I had to DNF at 30%

The premise of this book was so interesting, but I couldn't really get with the writing style and get to a place where I could really enjoy/ understand what was going on due to the continuous POV switches and violence towards women. The dual first person POVs is abstract but not impossible to understand, thoughI think it would do well perhaps on audiobook. Written out it was just a little too much.

Another major issue I had with this book is that it is described in the blurb as "takes on gender injustice", which I think is just a way to say there will be a lot of sexual violence, abuse, misogyny.... and maybe five books from now we will see some justice for that. The themes here are dark, and not something I look for in a fantasy, so this was not anything I wanted to continue reading no matter how amazing the ending is promised to be in the future. The violence towards women is just... ew. I am not interested and will not continue to read it.

Overall, this is a grimdark fantasy (disturbing, violent, or bleak subject matter and a dystopian setting), which doesn't mean it's too much to handle (some popular grimdark are The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang, and The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin), just that you should know what you're getting into when you start reading this book.

I'm sure this book is perfect for a specific niche of people, but definitely is not my preferred fantasy read. I cannot recommend it, but hope that someone can find something in this book to relate to and enjoy!

Trigger warnings: sexual violence, extreme war/violence, misogyny, abuse, graphic action

xx
-Christine

I was extremely interested in the premise of this book and the blurb we got had me hooked, but unfortunately I had to DNF this because of the extremely explicit violence and misogyny towards women which was very triggering for me.

"The elders say that trauma that strikes one in innocence, at an early age, is supposed to be something that will define your entire life, but it is really not. It is something much, much worse. Its living with a horror that cannot be escaped."

"Sankofa" is a rich and highly vivid start to a fantasy series! Afrofuturism has, if not everything, the most important topics including patriarchal society and futuristic technology. This book, to be honest, is not for everyone (look at trigger warnings below).

The only thing I wished for was the characters and their relationships. The two main siblings' relationship felt off to me, but there must be a purpose to this (possibly, missed it)!

I enjoyed this and I'll recommend it!
Trigger Warnings include slavery, sexism, sexual assault, etc...

This is not the kind of book for everybody, because it contains sexual violence and abuse, misogyny, violence in general and an ending worthy to read the book two.
We can see all the atrocities this book shows of the war in Africa, that clearly reflects not only the fiction but the raw reality of the problems nowadays, with the injustices, the male prepotency and the culture of an Africa devastated. And those aspects makes the story more realistic, like an old tale passing through generations by spoken words. You can almost feel the suffer in the people. A mix of fantasy, sci-fi, historical and magic.
I liked more than I thought and I am looking forward to read the next books of the series.

Thank you Netgalley for the arc.

I Dnf'd this at 50%
I love African inspired fantasy but this I do not. At 50% I had no idea where the story was going, I wished the author did not try to write this book in the style that he chose because he is not a master at the oral tradition feel of say Marlon James and I was disappointed.
The relationship between the two character felt just a little off and weird to me, couldn't either if them think of anything else other than each other?
There was no description of certain things and places the author kept mentioning metamonks, metalji and metalions without any description of what these things actually looked like and I felt absolutely removed from the book.
Lastly the straw that broke the proverbial camels back was the violence, especially sexual, against women in this book. I mean it was unending pages after pages of gory detail of assault against the main character and I couldn't do it anymore.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with this digital arc. The blurb of this book simply does not do it justice! It was so incredibly well written and beautiful I could not put it down. Sankofa takes place in an eery futuristic Africa and is all about spiritualism and women power. This story is told in multiple points of views, mostly those of a pair of twin sisters. I loved getting to see the events unfold through their eyes. This grimdark fantasy was engaging from beginning to end and I simply couldn’t put it down. I hope everyone else enjoys it as much as me.

I received a free e-ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

DNF 24%

Sankofa has an interesting premise. Set in an afrofuturistic post-apocalyptic alternative medieval Africa (that is a bit of a mouthful, sorry), it follows a pair of fraternal twins, Toomi and Ras, and Maat, the queen they will one day serve.

I want to say straight off that this doesn’t read like a lot of Western-centric fantasies. The language has a different quality to it, that feels more like a tale from an oral tradition. This may put readers off, but I assure you that it doesn’t take long to get a feel for it, and it’s worth continuing. I think that readers tend to give up on books that are unfamiliar, and we can miss out on stories that we might love because of that tendency.

I thought the worldbuilding was fascinating, although it is a bit confusing to start with. If I’m being honest, I am still unsure about whether what I was imagining is actually what was happening, but I still enjoyed it. It was a wonderful mix of historical, science fiction, and fantasy elements. From what I inferred, Toomi has the ability to see the world through the eyes of her bird, a Sankofa. The twins also seem to have a psychic connection. At the same time, they inhabit a world that seems to have elements of advanced technology, where humans and animals seem to be part cyborg. For example, the twins have an encounter with a metalion, which I understood to be some sort of lion fused with metal. As I didn’t read the entire book, I can’t say for sure whether I am correct, or say much about how this world came to be. I do wish some of these things had been explained earlier in the book though.

What the author did magnificently was to set up a world so hostile to women, and so brutally misogynistic. And ultimately this is the thing that stopped me from going any further. The violence toward women (sexual, psychological, and physical) was what made me stop. It’s not that I haven’t read worse in the past, and it’s not that it was way too graphic, it’s just that it was sort of relentless. I am not in the right headspace to cope. Early on, for example, when the twins are only about 8 years old, Ras strangled his sister, Toomi. I found that scene extremely disturbing.

I think there is definitely a market for this book, but I’d say it’s for those who like their fantasy/sci-fi on the dark side.

I was intrigued by the blurb of this book but after having read the beginning, I don't think I'm a good audience for it. I do not mean this to be reflective of the book's actual quality, just personal taste. I have trouble reading things that are quite so violent, particularly violence against women.

This is not a bad book. What it *is* is a grimdark book, which is not at all clear from the blurb – but then, the blurb tells you nothing about the book at all, really. Written in alternating first-person (a pair of twins, and a future queen) – my second-biggest problem with this book was that if I didn’t know it was afrofuturism (from the almost non-existent blurb) then I would have no clue where or when the story is taking place. This is always difficult for a writer when your characters have grown up in a world unfamiliar to the reader – how do you explain to the reader what’s going on? Different writers find different ways to handle it, and here, it just wasn’t done at all. (Or maybe it was, some time in the second half of the book. I didn’t get that far.) There are new nouns everywhere but no clear idea of what any of them mean; new (or modified?) animals and birds are mentioned, even encountered, but not described, so I had no idea what I was supposed to be picturing. In general I had a really hard time figuring out what was going on – at several points a character is described as going into a bird, but in what sense is unclear. Something psychic? Is it something unique about the bird? Or at another point, a character is described as flying around the city, and it seems to be literal flying, but again – is she in spirit-form, or is this something she can literally do in her physical body? When she breaks into houses, is it astral projection or really happening???

But my biggest problem was just…how dark it is. And that’s not a flaw, really, it’s a matter of taste. When Born Equal Only says it’s going to be dealing with gender politics, it means it – in the sense that literally everything is misogyny and abuse and rape. That wasn’t what I thought this book was going to be doing (I thought we’d moved past that point in the conversation by now?) and sorry not sorry, I can’t handle it. I don’t want to read about raperaperape, or how all men are evil, or how apparently even in some far-off future women are still men’s playthings. I’m pretty sure the book or series plans on eventually evening the score, either flipping around the power structure or giving women a more equal place, but I’m not willing to swim through all that awfulness to get there. Got enough of that in the real world, thanks.