Why Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone Is A New ‘Sword and Soul’ Tale

You aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, but as I gawped at the umber-and-ebonied hued illustrations of a black man and a black woman—him lordlike and corded with reams of burnished muscles, her drawn with doe-like grace and a crowning afro-puff hairdo—posed against the misty backdrop of megalithic edifices evocative of a magnificent medieval African nation, I couldn’t have disagreed more with that adage. I knew that this book would blow my mind. This book would decolonize my imagination, which had been overrun with images of straight-haired, Caucasian elves, wizards, and monarchs. This book would be one of the best I’d ever read. I was right. It’s been a couple of years since I checked out my local library’s sole copy of Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush by Charles R. Saunders. Since then, black monarchs have ascended the thrones of popular culture, from movie screens to Barnes & Noble bookshelves. It seems that audiences were hungry, starved even, for African fantasy heroes and heroines. And while such social awareness surrounding fantasy stories featuring black people is new, the stories aren’t. Image courtesy of Shondaland.com. Tomi Adeyemi’s bestselling YA novel Children of Blood and Bone represents this dichotomy of once-niche stories becoming mainstream. Through melding African cultural elements and political allegory in CoB&B, Adeyemi fashioned a story that is just as much the “next Harry Potter” as it is a new entry in the canon of sword and soul, which wa…