Children of Blood and Bone

Children of Blood and Bone is Tomi Adeyemi's 2018 YA fantasy novel, the debut that became one of the highest-selling YA fantasy launches of the late 2010s and the first volume of the Legacy of Orisha trilogy. The setting is Orisha, a West-African-inspired fantasy kingdom where magic was once practiced by maji, a Black-haired-and-white-streaked class who could access the powers of ten Yoruba-derived deities. Eleven years before the novel opens, King Saran ordered the Raid: a single coordinated night during which the kingdom's army murdered every adult maji, severing the connection between humans and the gods. Zelie, the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of the murdered maji, and her brother Tzain stumble into a sacred-scroll recovery mission that gives them a chance to restore magic.

Adeyemi's project is to write a major commercial fantasy series whose conceptual roots are Yoruba mythology rather than the Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythology that the post-Tolkien fantasy mainstream has defaulted to for fifty years. The Orisha worldbuilding is rendered with the kind of care that the mainstream fantasy market historically reserved for European-inflected secondary worlds. The Zelie / Tzain / Amari / Inan four-POV structure is well-paced, with each character carrying a distinct moral arc. The novel's central political claim (the persistence of magic as the persistence of a Black community's relationship to its own history and identity) gives the action sequences a moral weight most commercial fantasy avoids.

Recommended as required contemporary YA fantasy reading, as the right Adeyemi entry point, and for fans of the Tracy Deonn Legendborn series, the Namina Forna Gilded Ones trilogy, and the broader West-African-inspired contemporary fantasy movement. Read Children of Virtue and Vengeance (2019) and Children of Anguish and Anarchy (2024) next. The Bahni Turpin audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.