Children of Blood and Bone

by Tomi Adeyemi

ISBN 978-1-250-17097-2

“Deep down, I know the truth. I knew it the moment I saw the maji of Ibadan in chains. The gods died with our magic. They are never coming back.”

Once, Orïsha was the land of maji, ten powerful clans, each with their own unique powers to command earth or water, life or death. But eleven years ago, King Saran conducted the Raid, cutting the maji off from their gods, and killing every practitioner old enough to have come into their powers. Only the divîners remain. Children at the time of the Raid, they will live their entire lives under the heel of the Royal Guard, derided as maggots, never coming into their inheritance. It seems that the gods have abandoned Orïsha. But tension is brewing in the royal family. Princess Amari’s best friend is a divîner named Binta, who serves as her chamber maid, and Prince Inan is hiding a dark secret of his own. Having lost her mother in the Raid, a young divîner named Zélie harbours a deep resentment for the royal family, and a longing for the Reaper powers she should have inherited on her thirteenth birthday. Instead, she trains to fight with a staff, and dreams of a day when the divîners will rise up against their oppressors. But the gods have plans to throw some unusual allies in her path.

Children of Blood and Bone is made up of short chapters from several narrative points of view, including Zélie, Amari, and Inan. Zélie is joined in her quest by her brother Tzain, a promising athlete who takes after their kosidán father, rather than their maji mother. Adeyemi employs short chapters that have a slightly choppy pacing. Point of view changes are frequently accompanied by a time jump as well as a change of location. She tends to leap straight into the action after each transition, but I was frequently distracted from settling into whatever was going on by first needing to figure out the relative timing. It sometimes seemed that Adeyemi intended these jumps to add an element of surprise; by disjointing the timing between the chapters, she could cut straight to an encounter that the reader might otherwise have assumed could not take place yet. In general, however, I did not find this technique to be effective.

One of the characters I wanted to know more about was Binta, as I felt that her friendship with Princess Amari was necessarily a complex relationship that deserved more depth. Binta is a divîner, the only such to serve in a prominent place at court as Amari’s handmaid. It is specified that she is a paid servant, not a slave, but she is still a member of an oppressed group, and her relationship to Amari is therefore fraught with certain baggage. However, she is not a character that we get to meet or interact with directly. Instead, her death is a motivating factor for Amari, a moment of awakening to the injustices her father has been responsible for perpetrating against the divîners, who are referred to as maggots by those who do not share their magical heritage. As such, Binta is a character who exists largely in Amari’s memories and regrets.

Although the complexity of Binta’s situation was glossed over, I was able to see Adeyemi’s adeptness at handling such a power imbalance in the relationships that she subsequently builds between Zélie and Amari, and Zélie and Inan. Zélie has difficulty with trust, and does not always give it wisely, especially when her hand is forced by circumstance. Both Amari and Inan are shown grappling in different ways with their family legacy. Inan has to discover if he can maintain his father’s convictions when he is not directly under his eye, and Amari is faced with the realities of the world for the first time after a sheltered life inside the palace walls in Lagos. She has been trained to fight in theory, but she has never had to carry it out in practice until she defies her father and runs away. Adeyemi also did an excellent job with the sibling relationship between Tzain and Zélie, and I look forward to seeing her further develop Amari and Inan’s sibling dynamic as they decide whether they will perpetuate or defy the values their father has taught them.

Adeyemi has laid down the foundations of a rich world and magical system, albeit one that is in abeyance, more memory than practice for much of Children of Blood and Bone. This first volume is about the fight to restore magic, and explores the question of how the absence of power shapes a people. There is much interesting ground to be covered in the question of what happens when an oppressed group gains power and must figure out how to use it responsibly. Despite some choppy parts, I am looking forward to seeing how this series develops.

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