Children of Blood and Bone ★★★★☆½

I’ve been waiting for Children of Blood and Bone from the second it was announced. It’s popped up every so often in my Twitter feed and every single time, my hype for it grew. Maybe my hype overshot the book, but I loved this amazing story–pacing issues aside.

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

But everything changed the night magic disappeared. Under the orders of a ruthless king, maji were targeted and 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 the enemy.

Tomi Adeyemi’s worldbuilding was one of the best I’d seen in a long time. I was immediately interested in her world; her worldbuilding is next to none. I was entranced by the magic–or lack thereof–and how it was treated by the people of Orïsha. I wanted to know more about the story and dig deep.

But then there was the pacing. JM Tuckerman and I talked about it on our Booked All Night podcast about the book a little while back and I still agree that the pacing was whiplash inducing. It felt like an entire trilogy was smushed into one 525 page book. So much happened and we never really got a chance to feel the tension or spend time with the characters. The POV jumped constantly and there were times when I felt we were getting the scene from the wrong character’s perspective. A lot of the time, I felt like we didn’t even need all of those POVs. There’s already so much information coming at us that throwing up to four perspectives really threw me out of the loop.

I wanted to spend time with all the different characters and really get to know them, but with the way the story was going, it was just too fast to wrap my head around.

Not to mention that I didn’t really feel like we hit the meat of the story until 3/4 of the way through, where Inan and Zélie have to work together. It felt like the first 75% of the story was just setup for that moment and that’s a lot to wade through.

But even with the pacing issues, I still enjoyed reading it. I still cried, and as everyone knows, any book that gets me to cry gets bumped up a star category (or is forever immortalized in my Hall of Favorite Books, which is really just a labyrinth). I’m excited for the movie to drop and to see how the world is portrayed on the big screen, and of course, I can’t wait for the sequel!