The Hero of Numbani
Hello, all. Welcome back. Today’s entry is another random Book-Off find: an Overwatch tie-in novel, The Hero of Numbani.
Scholastic, Inc. apparently released a handful of these Overwatch tie-in books from 2020 onwards, with The Hero of Numbani being the first. I’m a bit surprised that Blizzard Entertainment (the game developer that owns the Overwatch IP) commissioned these. I was under the impression that the buzz of the game has started to die down by that point, but a quick check of the Overwatch Wiki tells me that Overwatch 2 was released after this novel and is still getting supported service, so clearly I was off-base there.
Up front, I will say that I am not an Overwatch fan. I did binge-watch those character trailers that were posted on YouTube years ago, and I once tried to put together a one-shot RPG game for a friend featuring Overwatch characters, but that’s about fist. My foreknowledge going into this book is that Overwatch features a Science Fiction setting that is a pretense for players of the game to assemble teams of colorful characters to battle one another in a First-Person Shooter game. The only characters I remembered were Doomfist (the big guy with the gauntlet whose character trailer featured him escaping prison by punching a wall repeatedly), the gorilla who’s a scientist, and that woman who travels through time and had an overwhelming Cockney accent. (Only Doomfist ends up being important to this book.)
With all that established, let’s dive right in, shall we?
STATS
Title: The Hero of Numbani
Series: Overwatch
Author(s): Nicky Drayden
Genre: Science Fiction (Middle Grade)
First Printing: June 2020
Publisher: Scholastic, Inc.
SPOILER WARNING
Mild spoilers for The Hero of Numbani will be included throughout this review, through I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labelled sections.
STRUCTURE
In this review, we will cover the following:
Premise
Rating
Target Audience
Plot
Action
Character
Worldbuilding & Exposition
Prose
PREMISE
Across the top of the back cover, in all caps, we get:
The world still needs heroes. Are you with us?
Enter the first-ever original novel for Overwatch, the world-wide gaming sensation from Blizzard Entertainment!
Below that is the premise proper:
In the technologically advanced African city of Numbani, in the not-so-distance future, humans live in harmony with humanoid robots known as omnics. But when a terrorist tries to shatter that unity, a hero named Efi Oladele rises!
Efi has been making robots since she was little - machines to better her community and improve people’s lives. But after she witnesses Doomfist’s catastrophic attack on the city’s OR15 security bots, Efi feels the call to build something greater: a true guardian of Numbani.
While Doomfist sows discord between humans and omnics, Efi engineers an intelligent and compassionate robot, Orisa, named after the powerful spirits who guide her people. Orisa has a lot to learn before she’s ready to defeat Doomfist, but Efi has some learning to do, too, especially when it comes to building - and being - a hero. With Doomfist rallying his fores, and the military powerless to stop him, can Efi mold Orisa into the hero of Numbani before it’s too late?
This action-packed novel is an all-new, original story straight from the minds of the Overwatch game team!
Reaction
As the premise indicates, this is an origin story for the character of Orisa from the Overwatch games. A quick viewing of her character trailer confirms that the basic framework of the plot hits the main points shown in her character trailer. Doomfist attacked an airport and ripped through a bunch of OR-15 robots, Efi decided to build a better security robot, and this led to Orisa’s creation, with various missteps along the way to forging Orisa into a champion of the people.
Okay, the first two paragraphs of the premise are on-point. What about the third?
… well … It’s not wrong I’m sure this aligns with the outline that the “Overwatch game team” handed off to Drayden to turn into a novel. It’s just that, in execution, this story brushes past a lot of this to hyper-fixate on the “learning to be a hero” angle, and then it does that very badly.
The fourth paragraph is less ambiguous. That one is wrong. There are a few action scenes in this book, but it’s far from “action-packed”. I also feel like taking an established character backstory and injecting it with a lot of fluff doesn’t quality as “an all-new, original story”. This would be like if A Dead Djinn in Cairo had been written after A Maser of Djinn, rather than before it, and then been praised as something brand new. What one ends up with is adequate as a prequel, but let’s not get carried away with describing what is actually delivers to us.
Tie-In Trouble
With Dragons of a Fallen Sun, it was hard to tell whether it was written for newcomers to the franchise or for established fans.
Here, there’s no ambiguity. If you do not know Overwatch, you will not understand the setting or multiple key characters of The Hero of Numbani. Drayden does not take time to properly explain things that are critically important to understanding even the basic premise, let alone to contextualize the beliefs and actions of the characters.
To give just one example: what are omnics? How do they differ from robots? Given that there was an “Omnic Crisis”, implied to be a robot uprising, a generation ago, why do omnics not have any issue with robots being used as slave labor, to the point that they auction off robots to humans and cannibalize unwanted robots to sell for scrap? Given that robot uprising and the fact omics seem to have no issue with the slavery and butchery of fellow robots, why am I supposed to think a human is racist simply for not trusting omnics? Is Orisa herself an omnic or just a robot? A friend of mine who’s into Overwatch at least gave me a definition about the difference between omnics and robots and clarified the Orisa is supposed to just be a very intelligent robot, but on my end, I had no idea what the rules were supposed to be.
Then there was the character of Lúcio For the bulk of this book, I assumed he was just some pop star that Efi and the other kids in her city loved to listen to. It turns out that he’s another playable Overwatch character. However, that fact didn’t become clear until the climax, when he sudden starts getting a bunch of backstory and then participates in the final fight. I was so confused that I had to look him up, at which point I saw art of him and remembered seeing him on YouTube.
To be clear, I don’t consider this to be a flaw in the writing. That last paragraph from the back cover makes it very clear that this is a video game tie-in that expects the reader to know at least the basics of the game lore. Much like The Fall of Reach, this book doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a video game tie-in. That’s exactly what we’re given. I’m elaborating this point mainly to call out that, if you aren’t in the target audience, you’re going to have a hard time following things.
RATING: 5/10
This book is a weird opposite of Dragons of a Fallen Sun. That book was one I didn’t like but that was also perfectly functional and quite good at points. The Hero of Numbani, by contrast, is a book I did like but simply isn’t that good. Even with me ignoring certain flaws (or, at least, not counting them in the rating) as a concession for it being a MG book, there are fundamental issues that keep the book from living up to its potential.
The biggest issue with this book is a lack of misplaced focus. Let’s take a look back at that third paragraph from the premise.
While Doomfist sows discord between humans and omnics, Efi engineers an intelligent and compassionate robot, Orisa, named after the powerful spirits who guide her people. Orisa has a lot to learn before she’s ready to defeat Doomfist, but Efi has some learning to do, too, especially when it comes to building - and being - a hero. With Doomfist rallying his fores, and the military powerless to stop him, can Efi mold Orisa into the hero of Numbani before it’s too late?
The sowing of discord, the rallying of forces, the military being powerless … all of that is set dressing. It’s never explored. In the case of the sowing of discord, it’s not even resolved. Doomfist just appears in some random action set pieces, culminating in a battle scene that is honestly the most incoherent out of any we’ve yet reviewed on this site, and then the story acts as if everything is fixed.
That’s not a problem in and of itself, though. The focus of he story is on Efi engineering Orisa and molding Orisa into a hero. It’s a tale of a socially awkward, 11-year-old robotics prodigy building a friend to help her save her city, learning and growing as a person along the way. That’s sweet and heartfelt. Granted, it’s Big Hero 6 with the revenge motive filed off, but derivative stories aren’t inherently bad.
Where the problem sits in is the execution. While the story takes time to set up Efi’s character arc, all the time that should actually be spent to explore that arc instead goes to her fumbling attempts to teach Orisa how to behave. If you’ve seen the character trailer for Orisa, the scene of Orisa causing a traffic accident while helping an old woman jaywalk is in the book … and there are three other scenes like it. By the time we actually get to the jaywalking scene, I just didn’t care anymore, because I knew the script. Efi would give Orisa parameters, Orisa would engage with those parameters while ignoring key details, and disaster would ensue. As a result of this, rather than their respective character arcs reaching a natural conclusion, Drayden spins the story’s wheels up until the last few chapters and then rush a resolution.
The result is a book that is poorly paced and feels very uneven. The potential for this story is there. Drayden started on a high note. It’s just the the book loses its way in the middle, so the ending doesn’t feel satisfying.
Author Accountability
Originally, I thought that maybe Drayden messed was a novice author who was debuting with this tie-in. The book does read like fan fiction at times. Maybe she’d originally written this story from some fan fiction site and then got paid by Scholastic to polish it into a novel.
That’s not actually the case. Drayden published three novels before The Hero of Numbani (I’m not counting those anthologies she put out in 2011). One could argue that MG is new territory for her, given that two of those novels were for adults, but the third, Temper (published in 2018) was YA, so she at least has some experience in simplifying things for a younger audience. I have not read any of her other novels, so I can’t comment on whether the issues we’ve covered already or will cover as we progress are regular problems in her works. Still, something doesn’t quite add up here.
This may be a problem that falls back on the publisher, or rather, on Blizzard. The back cover does indicate that the story idea came from them. I also remember a video from Jon Del Arroz a few months ago discussing the demanding working conditions (and disproportionately low pay for those conditions) that comes from writing tie-in novels. If the allegations discussed in that video are true, then it’s entirely possible that Drayden was handed an outline and a bunch of notes and then told to pump this novel out on an unreasonably tight schedule. The fact that Drayden has a day job (as indicated in the author bio for The Hero of Numbani and her profile on Goodreads) likely tightened her schedule even further. She may have been refused the time needed for additional edits or redrafts, though no fault of her own.
So, while Drayden is responsible for the flaws of this book, I will cut her personally more slack than I usually do for authors. She may well have entered this project with enthusiasm, only to be crushed under the weight of unreasonable expectations. This isn’t a debut novel that she could have spent a great deal of time publishing before submitting, and this isn’t a case of a well-established author with the influence to set her release schedule.
TARGET AUDIENCE
The inside cover of The Hero of Numbani does not indicate whether it is YA or MG. The Overwatch Wiki indicates that the second Overwatch tie-in novel, Deadlock Rebels, is YA, so maybe this was also intended to be YA. Given that this book is from Scholastic (renowned for their elementary school book fairs) and that Efi is only eleven years old, I am inclined to thing this is MG, and have rated it based on that conclusion.
As MG, I think this book is fine. There is a lot of Telling instead of Showing, plenty of very blunt exposition, and a lot of glossing over of elements that I would have personally liked to see explored more, but for the most part, these decisions makes sense. Drayden is simplifying the narrative significantly to cater to a younger audience who might struggle with or simply not care about nuance or complexity. This doesn’t completely justify things like the uneven handling of the plot. Still, there are plenty of elements that would be glaring flaws in an adult work (like how Drayden doesn’t seem to realize how much a “naira” is actually worth) that are downgraded to mere oddities by the fact a child wouldn’t normally be expected to notice or case about these things.
Also, as mentioned above, I think that this book’s relative inaccessibility for people who don’t play Overwatch is an example of understanding the audience. Sure, anyone could pick this book up and dive into it, but the name of the game is plastered across the top, and the back cover spells out that it’s Orisa’s origin story. Drayden knew who she was writing for and didn’t waste time telling them things they’d already know, instead focusing her exposition on details that were much closer to home for Efi specifically.
PLOT
Up above, I described The Hero of Numbani as Big Hero 6 without the revenge motive. That’s not a criticism, just a statement of obvious parallels of a child genius suffering a tragedy, building a robot to deal with that tragedy, and learning something about herself in the process before ending the story on a big battle and a promise of future adventures. I do think The Hero of Numbani is the lesser version of that story, but that’s less to do with a flawed concept than flawed focus.
The plot of The Hero of Numbani can be broken down as follows:
Main Plot: Efi builds a robot friend to save her city from Doomfist.
Subplot: Efi needs to overcome her social awkwardness and learn to build human connections (and to not alienate her friends).
Subplot: Efi needs to teach Orisa how to behave in order to become a hero.
Subplot: Hackers allied with Doomfist are sowing discord between humans and omnics by hacking into omnics and warping their programming.
Sounds pretty great, right? Even the actual confrontation with Doomfist being something that takes a backseat for much of the book, the looming threat is always there to propel Efi forwards, even as she’s struggling with friendships and trying to wrangle Orisa.
The issue is that that second subplot, with Efi teaching Orisa how to behave, swallows nearly a third of this book. As described above, it’s just the same scenario looped four times over. Yes, they’re superficially different - Efi and Orisa stop a car thief, they help out at a grocery store, the jaywalking incident happens, and than Efi shoots a kid in a Doomfist costume - but those differences don’t propel the narrative forward. Efi learns the same lesson about needing to moderate Orisa’s responses every time.
This second subplot crowds out the first one. Efi has a breakup fight with her friends before Orisa comes online; they don’t make up until right before the fourth cycle of Orisa’s misbehavior. There’s never time for Efi to learn about the importance of human connection. She just decides that she misses having her friends around; later, when she is ready to give up on Orisa, people validate her (something they were already doing), and she decides not to give up. It’s all so simple that it makes me wonder why the conflict existed in the first place.
Then there’s that last subplot. It just pops up at random and then disappears. There’s reference that maybe this has something to do with Sombra (another Overwatch character), but this is never made explicit and never gets any resolution. We’re just supposed to forget that it’s a thing as the story reaches the climax.
Taken all together, this is a book that has a slow yet till satisfying opening, a sluggishly paced middle, and then a very rushed climax. I don’t think it would be hard to fix this. If the struggle to teach Orisa were limited to, say, the jaywalking scenario and her shooting the kid in the Doomfist costume, and Drayden used the time that was freed up to shown Efi and her friends trying to deal with the hacking of the omnics, I think there would be more of a sense of things more consistently forward.
Action
Not counting Orisa trying to catch a car thief or shooting the kid in the Doomfist costume, there are only three action scenes in this book:
Doomfist attacking the airport
Efi and Orisa trying to take down Doomist when he attacks a museum
The final confrontation with Doomfist when he attacks a concert they’re attending
These fights are all confusingly staged and boil down to very colorful ways of saying, “And then they fight.” Half the time, I have no idea where everyone is relative to everyone else or what is or isn’t possible. The only one of these action scenes that feels effective is the first one, because in that case, the chaos adds to the tone. Efi is in a situation where she is an observer with very little control of what’s happening.
Given that this book is MG, I’m more forgiving of this than I would be if the book were YA or adult. Maybe kids these days just aren’t worried about the fights being logical and just want to enjoy the spectacle. That’s also why I’m not bothered by the fact Efi has incredibly thick plot armor in these scenes. It just feels a bit misleading to market this book based on action when there is so little of it and when what’s present isn’t particularly good.
CHARACTER
Efi carries this book.
Across the first three chapters, Drayden beautifully conveys not only Efi’s genius but her growing sense of isolation imposed by that genius. This poor girl can’t catch a break. Because she’s a prodigy, she’s going to two different schools at the same time, spending mornings with kids her own age and afternoons with high schoolers learning advanced mathematics. This is causing her friends to drift away from her, while the older kids don’t respect her due to the age gap. We’re introduced to Efi as she invents a personal assistant robot that facilitates teleworking and holographic video chats, and while she is selling these to finance her other robotics projects, her primary motivation is to use them to stay in-the-loop about the social buzz at school with her friends (by giving each of her friends a unit and asking them to record video throughout the day). Drayden doesn’t just make you like this girl - she makes you empathize with her. I think that the last time I saw a child character who carried a Science Fiction / Fantasy narrative like this was Yuki Yuna is a Hero, and because that show had so many characters, it took four of its twelve episodes to get its cast to the same level of relatability as Efi.
The other characters in this book aren’t anywhere nearly as well-characterized, to the point that they are just archetypes. Efi’s two friends, Naade and Hassana, are just Comic Relief Boy and Artistic Girl. Her cousin Dayo is a Supportive Big Brother archetype with a degree of separation added. Her parents are parents. Random neighbors and extended family and random neighbors and extended family. There’s this very minor subplot involving her cousin Bisi, who works for Doomfist, but he’s not even in the story until near the end, and he’s really only there to make a failed bid to recruit her for Doomfist’s ranks. Doomfist is … well, exactly what you’d expect a guy who unironically calls himself, “Doomfist,” to be like.
One might think that Orisa gets some characterization, yet the fact that she is constantly calibrating her behavior means that she comes across less like Baymax, with all his childlike innocence, and more like a very unsophisticated chatbot that needs to be prodded along with new instructions. Her scenes with Efi are charming because of Efi’s reactions, not because Orisa herself is interesting.
That really sums up the characters as a whole. I only care about all these other characters because I care about Efi. Whether or not that’s high praise for the quality of Efi’s writing or an inditement on the writing of the other characters really comes down to how optimistic you are. I personally think it works fine for this narrative. Efi is the POV, so we’re always seeing these other characters through her eyes. That’s enough to get us through the story.
The Oddity
There is one strange detail with Efi that I want to highlight. It’s not something that factors into my rating, because I doubt a MG audience would even notice it, but I think it’s worth covering real quick as something we can all learn from.
Efi is oddly fixated on her racial identity and on her identity as a citizen of of Numbani (which, according to the Overwatch Wiki, is a fictional city-state in West Africa that is located somewhere near Nigeria). In Chapter 2, when reflecting on one of Numbani’s founders who had also helped to found the Overwatch organization, we get this line.
It inspired Efi to know that an African woman - a woman whose roots were buried in the same rich soil as Efi’s - had more than likely brought the world back rom the brink of destruction.
Then there’s this bit when Efi looks at some OR15 robots in Chapter 3.
They were sleeker than then old OR14 “Idina” models that served during the Omnic Crisis, for secure, but Efi always felt like the robots were missing crucial pieces of Numbani heritage.
Later, she bolts a piece of non-functional hardware onto Orisa just because it looks like a certain traditional drum.
Where is obsession with her racial and cultural pride coming from? It makes sense for someone who’s a minority or an expat or someone reacting to an outside force trying to push a foreign culture onto her, but Numbani is a distinct African (or, at least, Afro-futurist) city. The only culture around to challenge Efi’s is the omnics, but we’re supposed to believe the omnics are fully integrated into this society and culture. We don’t see any evidence that Efi’s parents are nationalists who ingrained their values into her, nor do we see evidence that Numbani has a lot of strong nationalist sentiments. At least when Togo in Yuki Yuna is a Hero was characterized as deeply nationalistic, it was eventually explained by her backstory, and it was also presented as something that made her unique from Yuna and the other girls. Why is Efi dwelling on this?
I think this may be an incident of an American author projecting her own worldview onto a non-American character. I could readily believe that an American child of West African descent, coming from an immigrant family that’s very proud of their roots, might dwell on this. If this story took place in, say, a community of Numbani expats in Austin, Texas, this would make sense. It just feels very weird to read this very American worldview from someone who is obviously not American.
Like I said above, this is a small thing, and it doesn’t factor into the rating. I just feel like this was a missed opportunity. If Drayden really wanted this to be a defining attribute of Efi’s character, she should have leaned into it more and explored it. This idea of molding Orisa into a hero who specifically embodies Numbani could have been really engaging if Efi’s bond to that culture received more of the focus, rather than the various hijinks of calibrating Orisa’s responses to people in need.
And speaking on the matter of Numbani and its culture …
WORLDBUILDING
Up front in the premise, we are told that this story takes place “in the technologically advanced African city of Numbani”. That’s pretty accurate. Numbani is an Afro-futurist setting that is generic as they come. There’s all the usual stuff you’d expect in a low-effort sci-fi setting - lots of AI and robots, holograms, sci-fi weapons with technobabble names - except everyone has names from West African cultures and the buildings have gazelle statues on them. Also, this is set in the world of Overwatch, so there are a lot of references to the Overwatch organization, omnics and the Omnic Crisis, and other odds and ends to help entwine this story with the games.
Given everything covered above about the target audience, I feel like most of what I’d normally analyze here just isn’t relevant. Yes, the worldbuilding here has its issues, but most of those issues comes down to things being so simplistic that I ask questions the MG readers wouldn’t or else am simply out of the loop on information that Drayden could reasonably assume that Overwatch fans would already know. From what I can tell, the worldbuilding elements that impact the course of the narrative are internally consistent.
There’s also the matter that, much like Warhammer 40K, this is a setting that was created to flavor a game, albeit a First-Person Shooter rather than a tabletop wargame. Sure, I have a lot of questions about why there is a man strong enough to escape his prison cell by punching a hole in the wall and why omnics are people and why robots aren’t, but frankly, these things weren’t thought up to tell a story. They were created to give a sense of purpose and spectacle to firefights. It’s remarkable that this world works as well as it does.
One thing that I do feel is a flaw, which I will get to shortly, is that this world isn’t immersive. I don’t feel like I’m actually in a futuristic, West African city as I read this story; I feel like I’m in an American town that just happens to feature a West African grocery store. Still, I didn’t apply this to my rating because of the target audience. I don’t know that children really care that much about deep immersion. Making this story take place in an environment that was too unfamiliar to them might have driven a lot of young readers away.
All this isn’t to say that lore made for a children’s story or to flavor a game can’t be deep, rich, and more immersive. It’s just that I understand why these things aren’t a priority. What we are ultimately given here works just fine for the story being told. That’s enough sometimes.
That being said, there are three points here that I think are worth discussing. Two of these are Write What You Know issues, while the other is that issue of immersion.
Naira Millionaire
When Efi starts work on Orisa, she has a budget of 5.5 million naira, 5 million of which comes from a grant she won for her robotics work and 500,000 of which comes from a combination of a child’s personal savings and profits from selling her personal assistant robots.
Having no idea what a ‘naira’ was, I took it to Google. Turns out that ‘naira’ is the currency of Nigeria. As of February 24th, 2025, the exchange rate of naira to USD was 0.00067 USD per naira, or 1,498.02 naira per $1.00 dollars.
Wait a minute …
Efi’s budget for acquiring a wrecked security robot and upgrading into a premium fighting machine with military-grade weaponry is $3,671.51?
(And that’s ignoring for inflation. We don’t know how far into the future this story is set, but the Omnic Crisis started 28 years prior to the start of this book, according to the Overwatch Wiki. Even if the Omnic Crisis kicked off today, that’s nearly 30 years of inflation. $3,671.51 wouldn’t go nearly as far as it does today.)
And the thing is, Efi nearly meets her budget. She is able to buy Orisa’s wrecked chasis for a million naira ($667.55). She might well have financed all the military-grade weaponry she purchased off the black market, were it not for the fact the illegal arms dealer took one look at her, said, “I don’t sell weapons to children,” and then ran off with the money she’d already paid him. Efi than finances the rest of her rebuild with a few hundred dollars here and there, while also using her grant money to pay off the damages Orisa’s antics cause (nine months of grant money, so 15 million naira, or a hair above $10,000). Bear in mind that this lump sum is itself meant to pay off a destroyed building facade, a totaled car, and several other damaged vehicles.
I get the distinct feeling that Drayden doesn’t know how much things actually cost, or maybe she assumed that the lower cost of living outside of the US would translate to literally everything. Speaking as someone who living in a country where the cost of living is substantially lower than the US, but where electronics cost about the same amount, I do not find this scenario to be the slightest bit believable. A custom-built Terminator with military hardware should not cost less than a Kei truck.
What’s funny is that, near the end of the book, Drayden does have a reasonable price in naira attached to something. We are told a charity concert set and surpassed a fundraising goal of 200 million naira for disaster. That’s about $133,500. This is still rather small, but it at least enters the realm of reasonability.
Now, of course, it’s entirely possible that the naira is worth a lot more in this futuristic setting than in the real world, but that begs the question of why Drayden used a real-world currency instead of making one up. If I write a futuristic sci-fi story and give the protagonist 500 yen, and he uses that 500 yen to buy a sports car instead of a couple pieces of fried chicken from the convenience store, then I’d be needlessly confusing everyone who actually knows what yen are worth, when I could have avoided the issue by just giving this protagonist 500 credits. There’s also the matter of how this increased value would have a ripple effect. Sure, maybe the naira is worth ten times as much in this setting, which would increase Efi’s budget to about $36,850, but remember that her initial 5.5 million naira included childhood savings from birthday money and other such gifts (200 thousand naira, according to the text). I can believe that an 11-year-old would have $134 in accumulated birthday money stashed in a piggyback, but $1,340 is really pushing it, especially since we aren’t given any reason to believe that her family are particularly wealthy.
Code Magic
Unlike with The Eye of Minds, I did not feel like Drayden had no idea what she was talking about when she had Efi do stuff with code and hacking. Part of this is because she does know what she’s talking about, at least according to her author bio: she’s a systems analyst in her day job. Another part of it, though, is that she doesn’t just use hacking as this magic system that lets Efi do anything. Sure, Efi uses it to solve problems with relative ease, but there’s at least technobabble involved to explain what each problem was and how Efi was able to solve it.
Epcot’s Africa Pavilion
Outside of the names of the characters and very superficial elements, like honorifics and the names of foods, there is nothing about this story that makes it feel like it is set in a futuristic Africa, or even anyplace outside of the United States. Efi reads like a third- or fourth-generation American immigrant. There are random references to things to things connected to African spiritual beliefs, like the òrìṣà and a certain style of martial arts, but these always feel like an afterthought. It’s like Drayden wrote this book with zero understanding of any African culture, consulted with some friends who did understand, and then tacked on references and changed some words. (Two people in the book’s Acknowledgments are thanked precisely because of their understanding of African culture.)
As stated above, I can somewhat understand this in regards to the target audience. It just feels superficial, and it meshes poorly with Efi’s obsession with her racial and cultural identity. It takes me back to Chapter 21 of Iron Flame, with the Tyrrish complaining about losing culture that they never seemed to possess in the first place.
What really bothers me about this, though, is how it links to Orisa. Orisa’s name is drawn from “òrìṣà” which are … actually, I’ll let the book explain this.
[Efi] sometimes heard her mother and aunt speaking of the òrìṣà, spiritual beings who were an integral part of the natural world and touched their lives in ways Efi was still struggling to understand. She’d tried to ask questions about how technology and AI fit into it all, but she was usually swatted away.
That is all we get to establish the symbolism of Orisa’s name. It never comes up in any other context. This is one of the only two passages to explain the concept, the other one being the passage when Efi assigns Orisa’s name.
“But that name. No, that’s no good. Every great hero needs a real name.” This robot would be Numbani’s protector and savoir; she needed a name that would carry with it great weight and honor. “What about … Orisa?” Efi said. The thought had come to her as naturally as breathing, named for the spirit gods of her people.
There’s no sense of significance here. There’s no weight. It’s a passing reference, slapped in like it was an afterthought.
I want to say this is a missed opportunity, but that understates the issue. The origin of Orisa’s name is an established part of her lore. Her origin story should absolutely have explored this. This is the name that is supposed to reflect Efi’s deep reverence for her culture, yet the concept itself is introduced so casually, with no sense that Efi actually appreciates it, and then to slotted into place with zero sense of weight or reverence.
How can we appreciate the fact that Orisa is meant to be a hero of Numbani who reflects “Numbani heritage” if there is no sense that there’s anything that might constitute a heritage?
PROSE
Unlike The Eye of Minds, which talked down to its audience in its effort to be relatable and crammed in comic relief to the detriment of tone, The Hero of Numbani respects its audience. The prose if simple at times, but not more than one would expect for a MG text. While there is a lot of humor, it feels less like forced Marvel quipping and more like the type of humor elementary school students might be interested in. Perhaps someone with more experience in MG might have more to say on this point, but as far as I can tell, Drayden did a good job of writing for her audience without patronizing them.
CONCLUSION
The Hero of Numbani is a book that had a lot of potential and a lot to love. With a redraft or two, I think it could have been something truly spectacular, providing not only an origin story for a video game character but an exploration of a character who is otherwise in the background. A lot of my criticisms are things that could very easily be corrected with just one more draft.
At the end of the day, though, we got what we got. If you (or, in this case, a child in your life) are fan of Overwatch, this ay be worthwhile for the sake of that association. Otherwise, I’d recommend giving it a pass.
A PITSTOP IN NARNIA
The Onyx Storm review continues next week. After that, though, we’ll be taking a trip to Narnia with The Magician’s Nephew, another Book-Off find. I’ve never actually read any of the Narnia books, only seen the Disney film adaptations, so I’m curious to see how this one reads. That’s coming your way on April 18th..
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