Children of Blood and Bone

 This review will be about Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. Published on March 6, 2018, It’s the first book of the series : Legacy of Orisha series. The second book is published and the third book comes out in June 2024. It’s classified as a Young Adult, Fantasy, Romance.

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A little about the book:

They killed my mother.

They took our magic.

They tried to bury us.

Now we rise.

Zélie Adebola remembers when the soil of Orïsha hummed with magic. Burners ignited flames, Tiders beckoned waves, and Zélie’s Reaper mother summoned forth souls.

But everything changed the night magic disappeared. Under the orders of a ruthless king, maji were killed, leaving Zélie without a mother and her people without hope.

Now Zélie has one chance to bring back magic and strike against the monarchy. With the help of a rogue princess, Zélie must outwit and outrun the crown prince, who is hell-bent on eradicating magic for good.

Danger lurks in Orïsha, where snow leoponaires prowl and vengeful spirits wait in the waters. Yet the greatest danger may be Zélie herself as she struggles to control her powers and her growing feelings for an enemy. 

                                                                          

Review: 

This is a first, I’m kind of at a loss for words for this review. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book that are hard to put into words. 

There’s a map, Yay! But even with the map, for some reason it was hard for me to picture where the characters were. The way the characters were going for their first mission to restore magic, I tried following along with the map but I ended up confused because some of it didn’t add up to the map, so I ended up lost for a while until they got to a town. I think it might have been the way it was written or the way the map is laid out, I’m not too sure. 

I love that this book was inspired by Nigerian mythology but based in a fantasy world. I did see a review though from someone with nigerian roots and they said that they were disappointed with the book because the way the mythology and certain words for the incantations were completely wrong. So I was a little disheartened that a lot of that was made up instead of using the real mythology and language. 

The characters: I’ll start with Zelie. She’s very immature and doesn’t think things through. I thought there would be some character development and she would grow up more, but I was wrong (kind of). Towards the end of the book, she matures a little bit but she’s still very immature in some scenes to the point where I was getting a little annoyed with her character and it was becoming very hard to continue the book. It is Y.A though so I knew the characters were going to be that way for most of the book. 

There are 2 other points of views in this book, Inan and his sister Amari’s. I got tired of Amari’s point of view as soon as she joined Zelie and her brother because it was almost the same stuff in Zelie’s point of view but with repetitive sayings. Inan’s point of view was actually really good, he went through a lot of character development, believing he was on the good side of the war but later realizes that he might not be and starts to doubt his actions. 

What could be considered “romance” wasn’t. What’s supposed to be enemies to lovers felt more like forced romance. I didn’t really enjoy it, it didn’t feel right for Zelie and Inan. It was kind of cool that they could share a dream when sleeping, but even that felt a bit cliche. 

All in all, I liked the book but it could use a little more work to get it perfect! I will still recommend the book though as it was a semi fun read and something different.