21 pop culture moments from 2018 we’re celebrating
By Amy Woolsey
Cover to Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. Image via Henry Holt + Co.
Children of Blood and Bone
Children of Blood and Bone opens with a prologue that resembles a song, composed in concise, italicized sentences. In it, an unnamed narrator remembers her mother. Her memories are, at first, pleasantly ordinary: the smell of jollof rice, a radiant smile, stories heard at night. Then, they take a dark turn, the narrator’s attention shifting from life to death. She concludes thusly: “I think about the way her corpse hung from that tree. I think about the king who took her away.”
With those simple, disturbing lines, Tomi Adeyemi transports readers to Orïsha, a fantasy land as dense with conflict as it is with mythology. (For those who struggle to keep names straight, the book’s Wikipedia page is very thorough, and Entertainment Weekly has a glossary complete with a map.) Orïsha is engaged in perpetual class warfare, as the elite kosidán subject the darker-skinned maji to discrimination, servitude, and violence, robbing them of their magic in a wave of genocide. Eleven years after the raid that killed her maji mother, Zélie Adebola embarks on a quest to resurrect magic and fight back against the tyrannical King Saran.
As The Atlantic’s Vann R. Newkirk II notes, Children of Blood and Bone follows a long tradition of literature that integrates African culture and folklore into fantasy and science fiction. The author herself has acknowledged the influence of popular young-adult works such as The Hunger Games and An Ember in the Ashes. However, Adeyemi’s novel, the first volume of a projected trilogy, is unique for the ease with which it weaves together its disparate elements, creating a rich tapestry of ideas both timely and archetypal. Intricately plotted, addictively paced, and vividly realized, this is epic fantasy at its most enthralling.