Book Review: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Publication Date: March 6, 2018

Eleven years ago, King Saran destroyed the magic; now, the only way to save Orisha is to bring it back.

Eleven years ago, Zelie and Tzain lost their mother, and all of Orisha lost magic. The maji were rounded up and slaughtered by King Saran’s orders, and the diviners became second-class citizens, oppressed so they would never rise up again.

But all of that changes when a scroll turns up that has the ability to grant magic to the diviners, changing them into maji. The answer becomes clear to Zelie: they must bring magic back.

For Amari, the princess, the path is less clear. Though she’s joined Zelie and Tzain on their journey, she doesn’t know her place in the world. She’s never even been outside the castle before. Even worse, her actions make her a traitor, and unlike the others, she knows exactly what her father is capable of and what will happen if they’re caught.

☙ I absolutely LOVE Inan and Amari, and they make for some strong, compelling point-of-view characters. Despite being brother and sister, they’re both similar and dissimilar at the same time, and not quite opposites of each other. I found that they were highly relatable, and their character arcs were powerful, emotional, and fraught with so many shades of gray. How can you not love it? Their struggles and confusion and emotions were so visceral that I easily got swept away with them.

☙ Adeyemi really breathes life into a culture that’s underrepresented in the mainstream. Actually, one of the main reasons I picked up this book was the idea of the Yoruban gods, and while they don’t play as big of a role as I had hoped for, there’s no denying how much culture screams from these pages. It’s a rich culture in general, and one I’ve been fascinated with, so I love how it was woven into the story and all the new things I learned.

☙ The writing is beautiful and engaging. It’s a unique style, one that I feel doesn’t always work for me (the short sentences or incomplete sentences stacked so close together is sometimes jarring to me), but I did like it overall. The descriptions are beautiful, and Adeyemi does a really good job of moving quickly during action scenes. The prose reflects the urgency and really pulls me in and drags me along for the ride, which I loved.

☙ The fangirl in me is totally all about a certain romance which I can’t say because spoilers, but I’m pretty sure I melted from the sweetness. It’s just so cute. And who doesn’t like cuteness?! It wasn’t blatantly obvious in the beginning. I had suspicions, but it could have gone either way, but then it developed slowly and sweetly and … ugh. These are the sorts of romances I enjoy reading.

☙ While I felt the book started slowly, it really picked up pace right around 25%, and I was engrossed. At that point, the stakes became clear, adventures were happening, and there was death and swords and magic and shouting, which I’m all for. In the beginning, I just didn’t care about the story, felt like it was slow and dragged on, and didn’t care about the characters. As I said, around 25%, that swung hard the other way, and it was a fast-paced, exciting read from there.

☙ The magic system is diverse and intriguing. I really liked the history behind it (and there IS a history behind it). The different powers are described, and I do hope we get to see them all in action as the other books come out. The ones we do get to see are both terrifying and thrilling. Adeyemi does a great job of describing how magic feels, how it looks, what it can do, and I felt like I was there watching it. Also, maybe a little jealous, because who wouldn’t want to be a maji?

☙ I’m not a big fan of Zelie, and since she’s the main character and one of three point-of-view characters, that’s … sort of a problem? I can’t even pinpoint exactly what it is that I don’t like about her, but I just didn’t connect with her at all. She was constantly acting before thinking, putting the people around her in grave danger and then just wallowing in self-pity about it rather than learning from her mistakes. She immediately hates Amari, is constantly rude to her, belittles her, and several times thinks she deserves to be dead, and even goes so far as yelling at Tzain for being nice to her. I mean, I understand the hatred to an extent, obviously, and I think had it been approached differently, it would be understood, but instead, it came across to me as more a petulant child rather than someone with deep, festering emotional wounds.

☙ The world-building feels lazy to me, and it was really hard for me to get past that. To me, it read very much like taking major aspects and culture from a real-world place (Nigeria), mixing it with some spec fic elements and some other cultures, and calling it a new world named Orisha (which happens to be the name of the pantheon of deities in Nigerian culture, so … also not that creative?). I think there was just a disconnect in my expectations versus what the book was. I have never been to Nigeria, nor do I know a whole lot about it, but I do know some, and while I was super excited to see a lot of Nigerian culture and influence in the book (after all, that was one of the reasons I picked it up), I was a bit disappointed that this is touted as fabulous world-building when it felt more to me like it had a pretty heavy base in a real country rather than the high fantasy I expected. Even when other civilizations are mentioned, they obviously have a real-world base (the Britaunis, Porltoganes, Spani Empire), which just further confuses me and pulls me out of the overall world. I can’t reconcile whether this is supposed to be a high-fantasy realm (which the map/world seems to imply) or something real world. I found the odd blend of the two was awkward to me, personally. Another bigger problem for me was that the animals that inhabit this world are given real-world names with a few extra letters tacked on to make it unique, like lionaire, cheetanaire, rhinomes, foxer, batter. It feels random and unnecessary, but in order to justify the change (and I guess make it more fantasyish), the species are given weird quirks, like being much larger than real-world animals (large enough to ride on) and having horns and extended fangs. The creatures themselves sound cool, and I’d like an exploration of this fawna and more descriptions (how are they taming these giant, wild, carnivorous beasts like cheetahs, lions, panthers, and snow leopards that can clearly destroy their whole civilization if they chose to?), but the names just killed it for me. It also made it even more difficult for me to get a clear picture of just where the heck this book is supposed to be taking place.

☙ If you’ve ever seen Avatar: The Last Airbender, this plot is going to feel very familiar. It opens with Zelie (Katara) and her brother Tzain (Sokka). Tzain passes for normal, but Zelie is marked with the white hair of the diviners, which the kosidan (non-magical people who currently rule Orisha) fear. Their mother was killed years ago when their town was invaded and all the maji were rounded up and killed due to fear of their powers. Any of this ringing a bell so far? I won’t say much more because spoilers, but the similarities got worse the further along it went, to the point where while they’re running through a nearby town, I was almost expecting to find someone shouting, “MY CABBAGES!” I actually predicted the majority of the major plot points in this book by pulling the major plot points from ATLA and guessing how they’d be applied in this particular setting.

☙ The constant use and reuse of Gods! and Skies! got old really quick. They’re curses, as we might normally say “My God” or “Oh my God.” Except Zelie is a diviner who believes in the Yoruban gods, so of course it’s plural. And the kosidan say skies because … they don’t believe in the gods, I guess? That’s what was said at one point, except that the Gods gave the maji magic, and it’s only been eleven years since magic disappeared, so pretty much everybody in this book should be agreed that Gods exist. I could understand using it as a way to snub the gods (which seems unwise, but hey, people are people), but I didn’t understand their lack of belief in the gods. In any case, I didn’t feel like the slang really added anything, and it got to the point where it actually started getting on my nerves, it was said so often.

☙ Why maggots as an insult? I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it, per se, but there has to be a more colorful insult, I imagine. In a book that is so rife and rich with West African culture, maggots kept striking me as very Western and silly. Probably because it reminds me of pirates, thanks to Pirates of the Caribbean. This is a me issue, not the book’s issue, but it jolted me out of the setting every time it came up.

☙ Without giving away any spoilers, I’ll say that the climax of Inan’s character arc fell flat for me. There’s not too much I can say here without wandering dangerously close to spoiler territory, so I’ll just say that it felt sudden. Obviously, I knew he was going to have an emotional journey, as a point of view character (and also, because I’ve seen Avatar: The Last Airbender, as mentioned before, I knew what it would be because of course it would follow Zuko’s arc), but I felt cheated by the climax, like there was this big, beautiful build-up to it and then it happened in a flash and then we’re moving on. His character arc was enjoyable, if not mostly predictable, but I was disappointed that the most pivotal part of it felt glossed over.

☙ And this is where I should mention the other romance, because there are two, and the other one was so not my thing. I’m not a big fan of insta-love between parties that hate each other, and from the very start of the book, it’s clear that that’s where this is going. While I won’t post names, I do feel like it’s obvious very early on in the book. It’s just so corny and unbelievable to me how much their feelings and characters flip-flop all of a sudden and quite randomly. I didn’t buy it.

☙ I’m going to count the magic system down here as a negative, too, because I still don’t understand it and it seems contradictory. “From the Gods” is a good enough answer to me mostly, but then things happen that make me question even that. Like how the connection with the gods can be severed but people still have magic? There’s also one event (very spoilerish, so I won’t say) that completely defies the natural laws of magic as they were laid out, and no one makes a big deal out of it. They seem mildly surprised, but I felt like I was much more surprised than they were, and there’s not any explanation as to why or how this takes place. I’m assuming, since it’s a trilogy, that this is touched on later, but everyone’s nonchalance and disinterest in it annoys me.

☙ I cringed every time Zelie referred to Inan as “little prince.” It’s just … such an obnoxious nickname. It doesn’t even feel all that insulting. That’s the best derogatory name she could come up with? It sounds like something an older adult would say to belittle someone younger. But to intend it as a vicious insult between contemporaries? I just couldn’t. It jarred me every time it came up, and she says it a lot.

☙ I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but … I want more backstory? Usually in high fantasy I want less, so this is a change of pace. As a series, I can only hope that this will show up in the subsequent books, but SOMETHING happened in the past before the Raid. The maji, in some ways, aren’t the victims they’re always portrayed to be, which I expect Zelie to be an unreliable narrator in that aspect, but I’m sort of disappointed that Inan and Amari seem to be, too. Surely someone must know the history of what led up to the Raid, and since that’s the pivotal point in all these character’s history, including when magic was destroyed, I want to know about it. Especially since it was a crucial part of King Saran’s motivation.

☙ The colorism came out of nowhere, served no purpose, seemed to have no reason, and then simply disappeared. I was geared up thinking there would be some big deal with the colorism and how it played into the world, because Amari is darker than the royal family should be. But it just peters out and disappears almost as soon as it appears, and what’s worse, it makes no sense to me. I guess this goes back to the wanting more backstory. Why is there colorism? It doesn’t seem to be tied to any pivotal point in Orisha history that would make lighter skin more lucrative (i.e. colonialism or the privileged not having to work in fields so they don’t tan). All the reasons I can think of for colorism as they exist in the real world don’t apply in Orisha, and since it’s so blatantly obvious in the text and then is never mentioned again, it left me feeling confused as to if there was a purpose for it.

☙ I had trouble following the timeline in some places, and I’m still confused about when certain things happened. The big one for me was the Raid, which was eleven years prior to when the story begins. I’m not completely sure of the ages of the characters, but the main characters are all old enough to remember the Raid. Without giving away spoilers, the Raid was basically retaliation and revenge. But the timeline doesn’t sync up in my mind, because the actual inciting act would have had to have taken place at least six-ish years prior to the Raid. King Saran doesn’t seem like the sort to wait around and not act on something he feels is a threat to Orisha, so I’m still confused about that. Not a major thing, but it did stand out.

This review is SO LONG because I HAVE SO MANY MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT THIS BOOK. Children of Blood and Bone received A LOT of hype, and I think that may have been a detriment to it in some aspects. It was good. I don’t think it was great. It employed a lot of tropes and overdone storylines in a way that I didn’t feel was particularly unique except in the way it injected an underrepresented culture (and it did do a great job of immersing the reader in that culture). I didn’t love it, which I thought it would. I assumed this would be my favorite book of 2018, but it probably won’t even be in the top 10 at this point, which is a shame.
In the end, would I recommend it? Heck yes! I’ve been in love with the Yoruba and their gods and legends for years, even if I’m not as familiar with them as I’d like to be. The setting is splendid, the magic is fantastic, and if you’ve been looking for something to fangirl/fanboy over, at least one of the romances has totally got you covered. Add in death, betrayal, strong female leads, and an action-packed plot, Children of Blood and Bone has a lot going for it. What I would caution on, though, is not to fall prey to the hype and maybe go in with no knowledge of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’ll probably be a more enjoyable read that way.

Have you read Children of Blood and Bone? My opinion seems to be an unpopular one, as I’ve seen a lot of people loving it. What were your thoughts on it? Is it on your TBR list?