Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor

There's having a whole bunch of extra things to do when you're getting near teenage-dom, and then there's having a whole double life, which mostly takes place at night and leaves you constantly exhausted because you no sooner see the sky get dark than you have have head out to learn more about who you are and what you can do.

This is the situation that Sunny finds herself in, along with three of her friends. I haven't read the first book, where Sunny discovers her abilities yet, so my depth of background knowledge is limited, but it wasn't hard to pick up this one without have read the others, or to get into it. The three friends knew all their lives they came from magic lineages, whereas Sunny didn't find out exactly how odd her grandmother had been until she and her family moved back to Nigeria from the United States.

Now she's immersed in the Leopard Society, trying to harness her particular gifts while not trespassing spoken and unspoken laws - with not a lot of success. Early on, she is put to an ordeal that is sometimes fatal to those upon whom it is inflicted, and manages to come out of it intact, and with a couple of favours owed her - which she will need to survive the rest of the book!

I wish I'd had a chance to read Akata Witch first, but I'm reading this as part of my attempt to get ready for Hugo voting, and I have not had time to squeeze earlier books in series in to help inform my choices! Akata Warrior was  nominated for the Young Adult award.

It feels like it would have been helpful to start with the first book here not so much because I was in anyway perplexed about Sunny - her character is well drawn, and her problems compelling. It's more that I struggled a little bit with who her friends each were - I suspect a lot of the fleshing out of each of the other three members of the Leopard Society who are Sunny's age and go to school with her happened in the first book. So I get some of it now, but they're not as vivid to me as Sunny is, or even as her older brother is.

Much of the book revolves around the tension Sunny feels trying to balance her two lives - and in particular, what happens when the Leopard Society rules about not letting normal people see their powers conflict with one of her family members being in grave danger. Her older brother, away at university, is brought into a group that is part fraternity, but with extra frissons of danger. He tries to get away, and is badly beaten.

Sunny hatches a plan to help extricate her brother from the situation, but when she executes her plan, she can't resist getting a few personal licks in, exposing herself. What she did would have been dicey but fine if no one had known it was her, but she is very recognizable, and Leopard Society has clear injunctions against showing what they can do to others.

This leads to the punishment, which then leads to some fairly exceptional circumstances for Sunny and whatever magic she can do, which in turn leaves her vulnerable to Ekwensu, the evil spirit who has been threatening her. This is a really entertaining and surprisingly deep adventure story for young adults, and while I wish I'd had time to read the first book first, jumping in at the second wasn't too bad.