Thistle &’s Comments (group member since Mar 30, 2019)

Thistle &’s comments from the SOULar Powered Afrofuturism Reading Group group.

Our discussion of this book is scheduled for this Saturday at 1 PM EST. Agenda
1:00PM EST Wait for people to show up
1:05 Intros: name, pronouns, where are you joining us from, what maji clan would you be in
1:10 Group summary or favorite quotes
1:15 There's a lot of people vying for the throne in this book. If you were a kosidan, who would you back? If you were a maji, who would you back?
1:30 How did Zelie change over the book? Was it for better or for worse?
1:45 How did Amari change over the book? Was it for better or for worse?
2:00 What did you think of the love triangle?
2:10 At the end of the previous book, Adeyemi said that she wrote CoBaB to use fantasy to speak about BLM. How does this book continue or discontinue this commentary?
2:25 What did you think of Mama Agba's sacrifice?
2:40 What did you think of the ending?
2:55 Last meeting of year, stay posted for next year's books and possible EoY party
3:00 END
If you have questions to discuss that aren't on the agenda, comment them, and I'll try to work them into the discussion.

Do you have a favorite memorable quote from this book so far? Some of mine are:
"It would be good for you to stop thinking of death as something permanent and final. What we take from the beast, we give back eventually. One or two would have caught up before the beat came. The others would have enriched the beast's blood, making the beat stronger for us all." - Adalla's mother
"Our world can be re-created, replicated, and refabricated just so, but our past is fragile, irreplaceable." - Seske
"Maybe they will see that looking at the world through a child's eyes is not a deficiency, but just another perspective." - Seske
"It's not that we can't… It's just that we love the little conveniences of life too much." - Adalla

Discussion is a week away. Guiding questions are:
What do you think of Seske as a protagonist?
What are the parallels between Seske and Adalla?
Whose team were you on in the love triangle?
What role does scarcity play in this novel?
Does Escaping Exodus have a villain? If so, who or what?

If you have a question you'd like to discuss that didn't make the list, feel free to comment, and I'll try to work it in.

The discussion is about 2 weeks away. How's your reading going?

This was an interesting interview with Nicky Drayden: https://sightlinesmag.org/nicky-drayd...

Mini-review of Escaping Exodus from Chris Kluwe at Lightspeed (it's towards the end of the article (http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/non...).

This is a thread to share author interviews or thoughts on your reading of the book. Please be mindful that not everyone in the thread will be at the same place in the book as you.

I thought it would be fun to trial run a bookish game night. The game is pictionary (via this website https://skribbl.io/), and the idea is that we would only choose words or names relevant to Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. We'll see if we can award anything other than Internet clout. Stay tuned for the date! If you have any suggestions for other bookish games we could play, please comment below.

Interested to put this book in conversation with this article Radical Fiction or "Are We There Yet?" by L. D. Lewis (https://www.sfwa.org/2020/07/21/radic...). Article talks about colonialism in sff and I thought it would be interesting comparison given reasons Jemisin said she wrote Inheritance trilogy (can't find the link, but it was basically that she was having trouble selling stories with majority Black cast so she wrote a story about a white empire and how treacherous it was and was surprised at positive reception. Closest I can get is this interview: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/non...).

Here is the eventbrite to register for tickets for this discussion (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/soular-p...). Discussion is free, the paid ticket is for if you're ordering a book. We will work out the kinks on eventbrite so that the Zoom link you are emailed will be the link to join the meeting. Thank you for the great discussion we had for Pet. Hope that you join us for this as well!

Starting now - we're just going over quotes we liked

Here's the link to the zoom meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89841847089.... We're meeting in 2 hours. Looking forward to discussing this book!

I've put an agenda in the facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/70864.... If anything that you want to discuss isn't on that list, please lmk.

Are there any questions, themes, or character arcs from this book that you'd want to discuss?