Ok, so I’m almost three years late to this party, but I just finished reading Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, making it the first book I finished reading in 2021!
I don’t read a lot of YA fiction, simply because I usually have a hard enough time keeping up with all of the adult fiction I want to read. However, since I tore through my virtual TBR pile in 2020, I decided to give some YA must-reads a look, and that included Children of Blood and Bone (CBB here after).
I have really mixed feelings about this particular book. On the one hand, I think Adeyemi did a really good job of creating an allegory of racism and police violence, and had some interesting world building, but there were a lot of plot points that didn’t work for me.
CBB starts off at a break-neck pace. The first day of events in the book take 12-13 chapters to cover, and it’s just literally one thing after another. I suspect my 14-year-old self would have enjoyed this fast pace, but the older I get, the more I appreciate a slower-paced book with a bit more time for introspection on the characters. I recognize this as a personal quibble, though, and don’t count it against the author!
Once the pace settled down a bit, I was also able to settle in, but I still found myself occasionally pulled out of the narration. For instance, around the mid-point of the book, there’s a big arena fight event which I found pretty unlikely in how it was administered and the prize being offered.
Complaints aside, CBB follows a well-known and reliable trope of setting a group of teenagers on an epic quest. In this case, our characters are two sets of siblings (peasant fishers Zélie and Tzain, and the king’s children Inan and Amari), and our quest is to bring magic back to the world of Orïsha, which is a fantasy world inspired by West African cultures. They are opposed in their quest by the evil king, and Inan is actually an antagonist for most of the book as well, though he is a POV character so we get to see his inner struggle.
I found the magic in the world pretty interesting. Ten clans were gifted magic by the gods, each one having powers associated with that deity, such as healing, the ability to summon spirits, dream walking, and impressive pyrotechnics.
I also appreciated that Zélie and Amari were the primary characters in the story. I’m always here for complex female characters of any age. Zélie’s rage and self-doubt were both believable for her backstory, but they did not completely define her: she also has a deep love of family and I think there was a buried spark of hope in her. I think Amari had the most character growth though, going from spoiled and sheltered to fiercely protective and righteously angry. I have always loved, and will always love, a badass princess. It’s basically my favorite character trope.
Over all, while CBB didn’t entirely work for me and I probably won’t continue with the series, I feel that it has earned its popularity. I understand why it resonated with readers, and I think it’s a great entry into the YA epic fantasy canon.
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