Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

Warning contains spoilers

I quite enjoyed this one! It’s very easy to read, a straightforward ‘get the thing to the place’ story with mostly likeable and evolving characters and an interesting take on the use of magic. I’d classify it as YA fantasy because despite a bit of violence and some mature themes the main characters are all teenagers, there is a large focus on their relationships with their parents and also a hefty dose of romance.

Children of Blood and Bone is told through the eyes of three characters. Zelie is a diviner, born with magic in her blood but unable to use it after the King raids her village, kills her mother and many other powerful diviners, and severs the link between the gods and humans that made magic possible in the first place. Years later we find her and her remaining family struggling to survive, victims of discrimination at every turn and desperate for change. Amari is daughter to the king and witnesses the return of magic through an ancient scroll that her closest friend is forced to touch, followed by her immediate slaughter at the hands of her father. When Amari steals the scroll to avenge that death and right the wrongs her father has caused her brother Inan is dispatched to retrieve the scroll and kill his sister. These are our three protagonists.

I really enjoyed reading about the two female characters but I found Inan to be incredibly frustrating to read. He has a deep desire towards Zelie, their spirits connected to the point where he can read her thoughts and feel her memories but is torn by his family's duty to expunge every magic user from the face of the earth. Despite his discovery that he himself is a diviner he holds to this and is forever caught in two mindsets: I love Zelie and we should bring back all the magic and I love my father who will kill me when he learns I have powers so we should end magic permanently and then I wont have magic and my father won't kill me. Every time he makes a decision regarding his course of action something happens that makes him switch back and he is caught in this endless and very annoying cycle throughout the entirety of the book. Like dude he wants you to kill your sister for stealing a scroll and yet you think he’ll let you live when you turn out to be an actual diviner. I guess this is about teenagers, first loves and hormonal confusion but make a decision that will take you longer than five minutes to reverse.

Overall this is a good book and I recommend it. It has enough resolution to form a complete story but also leaves plenty to discover for the next book. The cover is just gorgeous. Every time I put it down the cover made me want to pick it back up and it perfectly captures the beauty of Zemlie and the overall feeling of the entire book. I am super grateful to the person that put this in my little free library and I hope the next one person to stumble upon it enjoys it even more than I did.

7/10