I got this as part of the Hugo Awards Voting Packet. I love this series! I look forward to reading the author’s next book.

While I am African American I am more American than I am African and well we all know why that is so I am not going to go down that road. And with that being said I did really enjoy this brief look into a black story being told by a black woman, but I think Adeyemi suffers from what a lot of us people of color suffer from.

Writing for the white gaze. And I get it, I'm not saying its a bad thing or that no one should do it. After all traditional publishing is still very much a bastion of Caucasianess, and they are the gatekeepers. But it still hurts that we still have to jump through those hoops. This was like getting a cake and then only eating the icing. She only gave us surface Nigeria. She cobbled together great sounding names without putting in the work to understand how the Yoruba language and culture worked. This was a California roll. Just enough exoticness to be a welcome departure from the usual, but watered down to make it palatable for the non-ethnic in the audience.

Just reading it from a purely YA standpoint this was a good first book in a series. The pacing is a bit wonky and like most books it takes this tome a while to find its rhythm and get on with the story. This book might have been a tad better if maybe 100 pages had been cut and the prose just a little bit snappier.

The world-building was rich, lush and s welcomed departure from medieval Europe. I am so tired of every fantasy being based on Tolkien. Like good grief people there is a entire world of settings out there! You are writing fantasy make up your own damnit! Martin took us on a roller coaster of settings, climes, peoples, places and religions for pete's sake! Why can't we have black people? Black dwarves? Black unicorns?

But let me stop before the "we can write what we want" brigade lit their torches and come after me.

The romance of course annoyed me to no freaking end. Like damn this is becoming a disgusting trend that I want every YA author to let go. Imagine how more creative we could force them to be if we just stopped letting them pair off our female main characters. And its only happening to the girls. If you read Percy Jackson yeah he likes Annabeth, but Annabeth tells him in no uncertain terms that protecting the world and doing her best is what matters more to her than her budding attraction to Percy, and her respects that and backs the hell off. You think if that story had been told from Annabeth's point of view we would have gotten the same things?

A fast-paced and exciting read. With characters, surroundings and events all creatively brought together to bring us a tale unlike any other. Sure to be a huge hit!

This. was. so. good.
The length was a little overwhelming at the beginning, but it was a fast read for me. I didn't have any dull or slow points in the story and was engaged the whole way through. I loved the characters and look forward to reading the sequel!

Great fantasy! I really enjoyed the world-building; it was fully fleshed out and very detailed. The setting descriptions had vivid imagery, too. But I think what I liked the most was Zelie, the main character. She's ferocious, determined, and resourceful.

I didn't really like the ending, and for me, the book had too many POVs.

Overall, a great fantasy book that obviously appeals to many readers and I'm glad for more #blackgirlmagic books.

This was just a sample but it was good and I preordered the book. I will not be posting on any review sites.

You know when sometimes you meet someone that YOU JUST DON'T LIKE BUT EVERY ONE ELSE THINKS IS SUPER COOL... yeah, that's this book for me. Sorry.

I heard A LOT OF GOOD STUFF about this, which is probably why I feel so conflicted for not really liking it? But also, I mostly disliked it because FMC Zelie just rubbed me the wrong way right from the start so. I'm like, can I bash you in the face already? But I stuck with it to the end because eh, it's not badly written. I think the only part of the book I really felt was when Tzain just goes, "eh, whatever, I'm done with your shit" and I'm like yea. I feel ya bro.

I have absolutely loves this.
I actually ended up buying the book version and finish it via the book.
I loved the story line, the world building is just amazing.
I had some issues with some of the characters however, by the end I was rooting for all of them.
Cant wait for book 2

Children of Blood and Bone is a novel I really, really wanted to love and so can't help but feel disappointed in the experience when all is said and done because, well, I didn't. I enjoyed it for the most part and I certainly found the concept interesting and thought provoking. My problem lies in the characters - and particularly the relationships between characters and decisions that supposedly intelligent characters made. That and the pacing, which just never seemed to click into place for me, instead either dragging or suddenly throwing action at you with nothing in between to really savour. So whilst some of the writing itself is strong, this never quite manages to raise itself to three stars, let alone the hype that it has been given.

I will admit the world building is fascinating, bringing in a far more diverse set of ideas and mythologies than I usually find in fantasy books - many of them completely new to me. Along with the fantasy aspects, there is a focus on the history of the land and the racial intolerance and violence which adds a layer of depth to the story. When magic left the land, the maji found themselves suddenly defenceless and in one night the King slaughtered near enough every adult with magical lineage and potential. Our three main characters remember the 'Raid', the night of genocide well, although from two different sides of the spectrum. For Zélie, it was the night that took her mother away. For Amari and Inan, it was the evening their father finally removed the threat of magic. Now the diviners, children too young to have grown into their magical potential at the time of the Raid, are below even a second class citizen. Known as 'maggots', they are the lowest of the low. Now Zélie has the chance to bring magic back to the world, but it's a task fraught with peril.

So far so good. Unfortunately, this is where it all starts to fall apart. Firstly, whilst the switch in characters works - largely because they are meant to be so different - Adeyemi fails to sustain this individuality throughout and all the characters end up sounding the same. When one is a maggot, one a princess on the run and the third the prince and heir to the throne, hell bent on foiling their mission, this is a definite draw back. But more importantly, the relationships between the three characters are so unbelievable and the romance elements - of which there is way too much time wasted on - are, frankly, the most unbelievable of the lot. One moment Amari is untrustworthy because of her background, the next moment her and Zélie's brother are making cows eyes at each other. That was bad enough. The relationship between Zélie and Inan is even more ridiculous. It's as though the author thought, oh, it's a YA book... gotta have a romance in there somewhere... even if it is the most stupid thing to shoehorn in ever. In it goes. One moment he is the enemy, you know, the one who burned your home, killed the villagers and is chasing you across the country with the intent to kill you. Then in the blink of an eye, you've fallen in love and it's all cosy cuddles and kisses in the darkness. Not to mention the dream walking of course. Just how many cliches can we fall into?

Which leads us nicely into our next complaint; stupid decisions and the constant changing of opinions backwards and forwards like a yo-yo on the spur of the moment. And even when it involves really big decisions and choices, the characters flip-flop and U-turn without a moment's hesitation. One moment I want to bring magic back, the next I'm holding back because it might be a disaster and then oh, isn't it beautiful, we must save magic. This is constant, particularly with Zélie and Amari and it becomes beyond irritating. The dithering was also a source of aggravation; you have six days to reach an island to complete a ritual and if you don't get there on time, magic will be lost forever. Are you really going to waste a night, day and then another night on a festival that brings nothing to your quest? Not if you have any bleeding sense, but that's kind of my whole point. There are inconsistencies throughout as well, not too many admittedly, but enough to be jarring if you think about them enough.

Unfortunately, what this means is that whilst some aspects of the world building are well done, it is just not enough. You still have a relatively unexplained magic system. You still have characters who are completely interchangeable despite supposed completely different upbringings. You still have a tepid, unnecessary romance that only serves to detract from the novel as a whole and then a load of writing about nothing. Whilst I started off really intrigued, by the end I was slogging through for the sake of finishing it. I really couldn't care less about any of the characters, except maybe the giant lion thing because she's quite cool. And just as a final crack, the blurb says - 'where snow leoponaires prowl and vengeful spirits wait in the waters'... there's no such thing here.

If you want fanciful landscapes and creatures prowling the nights then go and read The Cry of the Icemark. That has some real imagination even if it is perhaps aimed at a slightly younger audience.

Children of Blood and Bone is a powerful book. In the world where it is
set, magicians abused their power in the past. The current king was able
to take the magic away but persecuted former magic users and potential
magic users. The King's daughter has found a way to bring magic into the
world. After escaping the palace, she encounters a potential magician
who joins her to return magic fully into the world. They are pursued by
the king's men led by the prince. The novel looks into complex issues of
power. By seeing things from the prince point of view we see the
problems that may occur if the magic is restored. The current world is
unfair to those who have done nothing wrong but have the wrong
parentage. This part of a trilogy. I really want to see how Adeyemi
examines these questions of power in the later books.

I would like to spend a few lines to tell you a moment about the author’s choice to write this book. Tomi Adeyemi is to be admired, because she had a crazy courage to write and also want to publish this book that she started writing in a period of her life in which every time she turned on the TV always saw cruelty from police to black people. She had a huge courage to write this book from the strong, anti-racist theme, mixing everything, in more than 500 pages, in a world created by her, a world set in Nigeria where her grandparents lived and has a part on her heart.

One could sometimes be scared to see great books, get discouraged to start reading them, and the task of us bloggers is to advise you the right books, and that’s what I’m doing now, because I can assure you that in my life I have never read such a great book that in reality it has read itself for such a light writing, the living environment, the adventures that make us want to enter inside the book and start the search to save the magic together with Zélie, Amari, Tzain and Inan.

But don’t think for sure that the beauty of this book is still over, because it’s not! You can not even imagine what awaits you at the end … something happens that will make you want to have the second book, Children of Virtue and Vengeance releaseing in 2019, in your hands more than anything else.

Interesting worldbuilding, and dramatic stakes, but the romance between Zélie and Inan was nearly unbearable.

OH MY GOD I LOVED THIS BOOK! I NEVER give books 5 stars, but this deserved it. Can we please get a round of applause for the AMAZING world building, complex characters, and the wonderful development? I would recommend this book to EVERYONE because it is truly awesome!

Read for Hugo awards. The first two chapters didn't really grab me (though clearly others disagreed since it won!)

A gripping and painful read, dealing spectacularly well with loss and hatred in a complex magical world.

<blockquote>
"... eleven years ago, magic disappeared. Only the gods know why."
....I know the truth. I knew it the moment I saw Mama in chains, hanging with the maji of Ibadan from that lifeless tree. The gods died with our magic.
They're never coming back. [loc. 243]</blockquote>
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I am not the target audience for this YA fantasy novel, rooted in West African mythology. I am glad it exists and has garnered so much praise, but I didn't find it satisfying. In fact, it took me three starts before I got more than a quarter of the way through.

There are three narrators: the protagonist is Zélie, who saw her mother murdered for being a 'maggot' -- the derisory name for magic-users, or maji, who have straight white hair rather than the more usual black curls. Zélie is tough, capable, a fighter: she also has a hot temper.

The second viewpoint character is Amari, a princess who sees her father kill the slave-girl who was Amari's best friend -- and who turns out also to have been a maji. Fleeing the palace, she encounters Zélie, and discovers that their fates are linked.

Unfortunately, they are pursued -- by Amari's brother Inan, the third narrator. He is determined to take his sister home; unaccountably drawn to Zélie; and deeply afraid of the white streak in his own hair, the whiteness that no dye can hide ...

The setting and world-building is rich and detailed, a blend of Yoruba religion and Nigerian geography with fantastical elements. (I was bemused by trying to visualise a 'bull-horned lionaire', or a 'horned leopanaire'.) The magical system is clearly described: there are ten clans of maji, each with a different deity and domain. Eleven years before the story begins, the Raid -- a wholesale slaughter of maji by the king's soldiers -- apparently wiped magic from the face of the earth. The aftershocks of that slaughter resonate throughout Orisha.

Thematically, <i>Children of Blood and Bone</i> deals with power and corruption, and especially the oppression of a disempowered group. The cruelty and injustice of the king's forces is horribly reminiscent of contemporary brutality. The poverty in which Zélie and her family live contrasts sharply with the opulence of the royal palace: again, not a million miles from our own inequalities.

Unfortunately I found the plot (collect some magical items, go to a temple, perform a ritual at the solstice) rather cliched; and I was thoroughly unconvinced by the budding romance between Zélie and Inan. The writing style didn't engage me, either: short punchy sentences, dialogue that was sometimes melodramatic and sometimes flat, some clunky phrases ('on the coast of the sea'). And I felt that there were too many vividly-described scenes of violence and murder.

I wish this book, and others like it, had existed when I was a teenage fantasy reader. I will be interested to see how Tomi Adeyemi's writing develops over her next few novels.

[I received a free copy of this novel, via NetGalley, as part of the Hugo Award Voters' Pack.]

I received a download of this book as part of the 2019 Hugo Voter Packet, since it's up for the Lodestar Award.

I can see why Children of Blood and Bone has been so popular since its release. It's a weighty story with high stakes and interesting mythology. But unfortunately, it wasn't quite my cup of tea. Tomi Adeyemi's writing style is merely sufficient here, with narration from three different point of view characters that never conveys the personality and immediacy that I enjoy in first person, present tense writing. It all feels a little flat and overwrought. It's also a very violent, bloody book, with a high body count. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, and there's definitely a reason this world is portrayed so brutally, but side characters have a tendency to die in this book before we can grow attached to them, so we don't really have any secondary cast members to care about heading into the sequel.

I loved this book. Now, if I can just say something more useful...

Tomi Adeyemi is Nigherian-American. This is a book grounded in Nigerian tradition, storytelling, and imagery, and reflecting, in mythic form, many of the tensions affecting contemporary American society. Because I listened ti the audiobook, I'm relying on Wikipedia for spellings.

The kingdom of Orȉsha once had a thriving culture of magic-wielding maji clans, living among the non-magical kosidàn. Then King Saran blamed the maji, all of them, for the death of his first family. He destroyed magic, by means that we don't fully understand at least in this first volume of the trilogy, and killed all the adult maji. Their underage children of likely magical talent, called diviners, are left alive, on the theory that they can now never become maji, but they and their kosidàn family members face punitive taxation and harsh punishment for even small offenses.

Zélie is a young diviner, about seventeen now, who saw her mother murdered by royal soldiers in what is referred to as "the raid," when Saran had all the maji killed. The first part of the book is about the events that led Zélie to launch an unlikely crusade to restore magic, with her even more unlikely ally, Saran's daughter, Princess Amari. Their equally determined opponent is Amari's brother, Crown Prince Inan. Zélie's brother, Tzain, like their father not magical at all, thinks this is a terrible idea until it becomes clear that the only alternative is that they'll all be killed--but he promised their dead mother and still-living Baba (father, in Yoruba), that he would protect Zélie no matter what.

We're taken on a journey through a brilliantly realized world, with characters who are complex, compelling mixes of good and bad, strength and weakness. This is, as I said, the first book of a trilogy, and there is a larger, overarching story, but this book is about Zélie's quest to bring back magic, and reaches a proper and satisfying interim conclusion.

I can't recommend this highly enough. I wasn't initially attracted to this book, but was pressed to read it by someone whose tastes have, I would have thought, not enough overlap for me to be able to trust a recommendation for what looked like simply the start of yet another multi-volume fantasy epic. Oh, how wrong I was! It is rich, original, not at all what I expected, and pulled me in almost immediately.

Highly recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via Netgalley, as part of the 2019 Hugo Finalist Packet, and am reviewing it voluntarily.

A fantasy book like no other. Tomi created a fantastic cast of characters I found myself quickly loving all of them.

This book is amazing! I’m so glad I finally read this! I don’t want to give away any spoilers because I went into this completely blind and I prefer that with most stories. You will not be disappointed! I can’t wait for the second book to come out! I love this book so much I went out and bought a physical hard cover copy to keep on my shelf the cover is stunning as well beautiful artwork!!!