![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Tomi Adeyemi: Children of Blood and Bone
Aug. 23rd, 2018 03:12 amThe buzz about Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone has been building higher and higher, and there’s a host of reviews out there voicing one superlative after another about this book. Some of that buzz, I think, is warranted - but not all of it.
The story is set in the land of Orisha, which is largely based on the place we call Nigeria, and draws heavily on Yoruban culture and tradition. The time period is vague, there are some things - mostly weapons and instruments of control and torture - that hint at a well-developed technology, but at the sane time, people travel on the backs of animals and soldiers carry swords.
The land of Orisha was until fairly recently a place where maji, also called diviners, people who can - or could, at one time, not too long ago, before the magic disappeared - call on extraordinary powers, were in the ascendancy, mostly using their abilities for the wellbeing of the people, but slowly falling into the corruption that power brings, coming to be hated and feared rather than loved and cherished. Eleven years before the novel opens, the powers of all the maji simply vanished, leaving them helpless before the resentment of the ordinary populace. King Saran, not himself of a maji family, ordered the Raid, in which thousands of maji were killed or taken prisoner, the remainder stripped of their possessions and position, condemned to live as a marked and reviled caste, easy to recognise by their darker skin and white hair.
Zelie is a maji, the daughter of a maji woman who died in the Raid and a non-maji father, a simple fisherman. Like several other young women in her village, she has been trained in secret to fight with a staff. The story begins with Zelie and her non-maji brother Tzain traveling from their own village to the royal city of Lagos to sell a rare fish at the market there, in the hopes of bargaining for enough money to pay the crippling taxes levied on families with diviners.
Zelie sells the fish successfully, but before she can leave Lagos, she is approached by a terrified young woman, nobility by her paler skin and rich clothing, who begs her help in escaping the king’s soldiers. Impulsively, Zelie does just that, which results in the three young people fleeing from Lagos, now marked as fugitives.
The young woman is Amari, the King’s daughter, who, horrified on seeing her father kill her closest friend, a diviner servant girl, has stolen an artefact that seems to have the power to awaken the lost gifts of the diviners, and fled from the palace. Tasked with pursuing her and her new allies Zelie and Tzain is her brother Inan, heir to the throne and a captain of the King’s guard. The novel, first in a trilogy, tells the story of Zelie, Amari, and Tzain’s quest to use the artefact to restore the powers of the maji in Orisha.
I have a strange, mixed reaction to this novel. Perhaps because it is intended for young adults, perhaps because it seems to borrow heavily from some of the storylines of The Last Airbender, the narrative line seems overly simple, almost predictable at times. The romantic element was actually somewhat repellant to me, because it reinforces the tropes of a fated attraction to the man who hurts you, and trying to save him through changing him. I became frustrated with what seemed to me to be a repetitive structure through much of the novel where story elements were recycled to create more action, without much real movement. Even more frustrating, in some ways, the story seems to spend more energy on Inan’s journey than that of Zelie or Amari - but that could just be me, identifying more with the two girls and wanting the focus to be on them, not the self-loathing, violent and untrustworthy ‘bad boy’ who is nonetheless positioned as the love object for the story’s main protagonist. However, the final scenes appear to subvert some of the more annoying tropes, so I have hopes that the second novel will be more rewarding in these areas.
But. Despite my criticisms of the novel, there are some solid reasons behind the praise it has garnered.
It’s without doubt a powerful exploration of oppression set in a wholly African-derived world. This is a novel of a kind we still have far too little of, a novel that draws on African history, culture, religion, that assumes as a given that a story in which all the characters are black is just as relevant as the thousands of novels in which all the characters are white. It is important because of where it is set, what are its sources, who are its heroes.
And then, too, there is the kind of world in which this story is set, the circumstances that surround the story. The individual incidents of oppression, violence, dysfunctional family dynamics, and wholly toxic masculinity that the two girls encounter again and again in their quest to restore the connection between men and gods that allows magic to flourish, are powerful, searing, indelible images. It is important that we see the horrors that humanity inflicts upon its most vulnerable, that we never forget why we fight for justice.
In the final analysis, it seems to me as if the weight of meaning behind the story is more potent than the story itself, and that leaves me oddly dissatisfied, wishing for a stronger, more unique story to pin such important messages on. But perhaps I’m asking too much. This is, after all, a first novel from a young writer. And had it not been for the hype, I think I’d have been more receptive. As it was, I kept waiting for this book to astound me, to be life-changing and awe-inspiring, and it simply isn’t a strong enough work to deliver on that overwrought expectation. It’s a good debut novel, it presents its secondary world well, and carries some powerful messages about fighting oppression, and it’s an important addition to the growing number of science fiction and fantasy novels that are not based in European history and culture. It’s a good read, and I expect Adeyemi’s work to mature over time. But for me, Children of Blood and Bone does not live up to the press it’s received.
The story is set in the land of Orisha, which is largely based on the place we call Nigeria, and draws heavily on Yoruban culture and tradition. The time period is vague, there are some things - mostly weapons and instruments of control and torture - that hint at a well-developed technology, but at the sane time, people travel on the backs of animals and soldiers carry swords.
The land of Orisha was until fairly recently a place where maji, also called diviners, people who can - or could, at one time, not too long ago, before the magic disappeared - call on extraordinary powers, were in the ascendancy, mostly using their abilities for the wellbeing of the people, but slowly falling into the corruption that power brings, coming to be hated and feared rather than loved and cherished. Eleven years before the novel opens, the powers of all the maji simply vanished, leaving them helpless before the resentment of the ordinary populace. King Saran, not himself of a maji family, ordered the Raid, in which thousands of maji were killed or taken prisoner, the remainder stripped of their possessions and position, condemned to live as a marked and reviled caste, easy to recognise by their darker skin and white hair.
Zelie is a maji, the daughter of a maji woman who died in the Raid and a non-maji father, a simple fisherman. Like several other young women in her village, she has been trained in secret to fight with a staff. The story begins with Zelie and her non-maji brother Tzain traveling from their own village to the royal city of Lagos to sell a rare fish at the market there, in the hopes of bargaining for enough money to pay the crippling taxes levied on families with diviners.
Zelie sells the fish successfully, but before she can leave Lagos, she is approached by a terrified young woman, nobility by her paler skin and rich clothing, who begs her help in escaping the king’s soldiers. Impulsively, Zelie does just that, which results in the three young people fleeing from Lagos, now marked as fugitives.
The young woman is Amari, the King’s daughter, who, horrified on seeing her father kill her closest friend, a diviner servant girl, has stolen an artefact that seems to have the power to awaken the lost gifts of the diviners, and fled from the palace. Tasked with pursuing her and her new allies Zelie and Tzain is her brother Inan, heir to the throne and a captain of the King’s guard. The novel, first in a trilogy, tells the story of Zelie, Amari, and Tzain’s quest to use the artefact to restore the powers of the maji in Orisha.
I have a strange, mixed reaction to this novel. Perhaps because it is intended for young adults, perhaps because it seems to borrow heavily from some of the storylines of The Last Airbender, the narrative line seems overly simple, almost predictable at times. The romantic element was actually somewhat repellant to me, because it reinforces the tropes of a fated attraction to the man who hurts you, and trying to save him through changing him. I became frustrated with what seemed to me to be a repetitive structure through much of the novel where story elements were recycled to create more action, without much real movement. Even more frustrating, in some ways, the story seems to spend more energy on Inan’s journey than that of Zelie or Amari - but that could just be me, identifying more with the two girls and wanting the focus to be on them, not the self-loathing, violent and untrustworthy ‘bad boy’ who is nonetheless positioned as the love object for the story’s main protagonist. However, the final scenes appear to subvert some of the more annoying tropes, so I have hopes that the second novel will be more rewarding in these areas.
But. Despite my criticisms of the novel, there are some solid reasons behind the praise it has garnered.
It’s without doubt a powerful exploration of oppression set in a wholly African-derived world. This is a novel of a kind we still have far too little of, a novel that draws on African history, culture, religion, that assumes as a given that a story in which all the characters are black is just as relevant as the thousands of novels in which all the characters are white. It is important because of where it is set, what are its sources, who are its heroes.
And then, too, there is the kind of world in which this story is set, the circumstances that surround the story. The individual incidents of oppression, violence, dysfunctional family dynamics, and wholly toxic masculinity that the two girls encounter again and again in their quest to restore the connection between men and gods that allows magic to flourish, are powerful, searing, indelible images. It is important that we see the horrors that humanity inflicts upon its most vulnerable, that we never forget why we fight for justice.
In the final analysis, it seems to me as if the weight of meaning behind the story is more potent than the story itself, and that leaves me oddly dissatisfied, wishing for a stronger, more unique story to pin such important messages on. But perhaps I’m asking too much. This is, after all, a first novel from a young writer. And had it not been for the hype, I think I’d have been more receptive. As it was, I kept waiting for this book to astound me, to be life-changing and awe-inspiring, and it simply isn’t a strong enough work to deliver on that overwrought expectation. It’s a good debut novel, it presents its secondary world well, and carries some powerful messages about fighting oppression, and it’s an important addition to the growing number of science fiction and fantasy novels that are not based in European history and culture. It’s a good read, and I expect Adeyemi’s work to mature over time. But for me, Children of Blood and Bone does not live up to the press it’s received.