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The Binti books are great for a myriad of reasons. It's refreshing to read books from a perspective often ignored. They are about a girl from a tribe on Earth who's been allowed on an intergalactic university and how she experiences this– but really, it could just as well be about a girl from an African tribe who goes to a university in the United States.

It handles a great many themes: culture, heritage, multiculturalism, and what a big, diverse society could could like (and: how it definitely would not be without problems, but just trying to solve those and be open goes a long way!).

Lots of other welcome aspects: LGBT & the importance of pronouns are things that are a part of this novel, but in a casual way. Trauma, therapy, panic attacks, mental health are all normalized.

And all of this in books that are between 100 and 200 pages in length!

I do have some problems with them, especially in this second book: the actual plot itself feels somewhat lacklustre, and because it tries to handle so many things at once I feel like the story is a bit lost. I think this would work better more fleshed out. Especially in this second book, it felt a bit on-the-nose and condensed.

But it's still very much worth reading.

(oh also there's a spaceship in this one that's apparently a living being and it's now pregnant and will birth a baby-spaceship soon or something like that so 10/10 would read again)