Children of Blood and Bone (2018)

*Premise spoilers.*

The first book in this YA fantasy series is brutal but engrossing, a beautiful read that explores hard truths through a lens of magic. I’m excited to pick up the next installment!

In the country of Orïsha, Zélie has spent most of her life in fear and anger. Her white hair marks her out as a divîner, part of an Orïshan underclass with a genetic capability for magic. However, a massacre of the community elders in Zélie’s youth, including her mother, coincided with a total loss of magic among their people, so the surviving divîners are left an oppressed and feared minority without any powers to protect them. When Zélie has an unexpected run-in with Amari, the daughter of the divîner-hating king, she learns of a ritual that could bring magic back, and she and Amari team up for this sacred quest.

Fantasy books that use genre conventions as stand-ins for real-world oppression are nothing new, but in many cases, that practice is a way to tell oppressor/oppressed narratives in which white people still get to be the underdog heroes. In Children of Blood and Bone, we’re in a fictional country inspired by Nigeria, and nearly everyone is Black. In amongst the story of the powerful elites and the underclass who’s been stripped of their magic, we also get Nigerian-inspired culture, replete with descriptions of food and garments, the pain of colorism, a loving celebration of natural hairstyles, incantations in Yoruba, and echoes of real-world genocide and oppression.

Some of the plot beats here are well-trod—a fight to overthrow a tyrannical regime, a system of magical clans that just begs readers to choose their own, a teenage savior who only has one shot at fixing her country, an enemies-to-lovers dynamic—but I like what author Tomi Adeyemi does within all that. I like that Zélie is from the Reaper clan. On the face of it, this seems the scariest clan, the most prone to “evil,” as they can summon protectors made of spirits of the dead. But 1) Zélie proves that she would absolutely be a scary badass if she gets her powers back, 2) she’s decidedly not-evil, and 3) in the divîner/maji community, Reapers aren’t at all considered bad. Rather, they’re powerful protectors, as well as the ones who can help souls find peace after death.

I like the exploration of Amari and her decisions regarding the ritual, as well as her insecurities about how much she can actually do to help. There are moments where it gets a bit “poor little princess,” but on the whole, Amari is someone who’s coming to terms with her own privilege while also reckoning with the genuine traumas of her past. Her brother Inan, who’s tasked her stopping her and Zélie, is something of a more complex Kylo Ren type, albeit one who was raised by a vicious bigot (which was so not Kylo Ren.) He’s someone who’s fully bought into the oppressor doctrine, but as things get personal and something comes along to shake his beliefs, he fights like mad to cling onto them even as they crumble around him. By the time it’s all said and done, I know what sort of outcome I don’t want for his character, but for now, his journey interests me.

Warnings

Strong violence (including genocide and discussion of rape,) language, drinking/smoking, mild sexual content, and strong thematic elements.