West African-inspired young adult fantasy
Our feminist fantasy book club has been cranking through the books this year. We picked our list by nominating two books each and drawing them from a hat, and this was my first book of the year. I’m always on the lookout for diverse books to read, and fantasy is a notoriously homogeneous genre. I had come across this book in a list, and it has since caused a bit of a stir winning a Hugo and being turned into a film, so I decided to nominate it.
“Children of Blood and Bone” by Tomi Adeyemi is a young adult fantasy novel about a land called Orïsha where people are either born as maji or kosidán. Once, all maji wielded magic, but since the kosidán king Saran took the magic away and killed all the maji, the powerless maji children, distinguishable by their white hair and known as diviners, have been subjugated by the kosidán. Zélie, a diviner who lost her mother in the raids, tries to keep her head down and help her father and brother eke out a living. However, when her path crosses with kosidán princess Amari on the run, Zélie’s humble life is lost forever.
My attempt at some West African inspired cooking for our book club
This is a spirited novel that takes the hallmarks of the young adult fantasy genre and recasts them against a backdrop of West African culture. This is a very readable book, and Adeyemi writes from the heart and her strength (and focus) is emotions and relationships. There are three point of view characters, but by far the most compelling are Zélie and Inan, Amari’s older brother and the crown prince. Without giving too much away, there was an element of magic that I really enjoyed – the ability to conjure a dreamscape and people you know inside (although there were some elements of magic that I found really disturbing). I was also really on board with everyone riding giant lions, tigers, panthers and cheetahs everywhere.
As readable as this book is, it definitely had plenty of fantasy and young adult tropes. Lost parents, hidden powers, runaways, royalty. These themes are common throughout lots of fantasy novels, and aren’t fatal to a good story. I absolutely believe that fantasy and science fiction needs more authors of colour, and I understand the statement the author was making about the subjugation of a class of people (with darker skin colour) by another. However, I think that for a novel to use tropes and still be good, it needs to have something extra and I’m just not quite sure this book has that extra factor. I’m also not quite sure that there was the correct number of point of view characters. I think that maybe it should have been two or four, because three just seems a little off-kilter.
An easy read with some ambitious world-building and some interesting magic, I’ll be curious to see how it is adapted on screen.
Tinted Edges 