Binti

In NPR’s “Binti’s Story Is Finished—But Don’t Expect Completion,” award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer Amal El-Mohtar (author of The Honey Month) writes of her disappointment with The Night Masquerade, the final novella in the Binti trilogy. She writes:

It wasn’t enough, for me. After loving Home as much as I did, I wanted more from this, more rigor, more thoughtfulness, more craft. I do expect authors to tie up loose ends; I do expect more from books than a sequence of interesting situations. But taken as moments, as droplets refracting light, those situations are generative, moving, and often powerful.

Do you agree or disagree with El-Mohtar’s assessment? El-Mohtar also discusses in the review that she expected the third and final book to “synthesize the material in the previous two, to give some sense of completion and a new, different wholeness.” Did you feel that the trilogy was a unified whole? Cite evidence from the text to defend your answer.

Teaching Suggestion: Engaging the “Evaluate” level of Bloom’s taxonomy, ask students to dive deeply into this polarizing review of The Night Masquerade, and ask them if they agree or disagree. Be sure to have them defend their arguments with supporting text-based evidence, while also reassuring them that there is no “right” answer here.