My Overall Rating for Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi: 3 of 5 stars
3 Stars
Children of Blood and Bone is a lot like a salad: they’re combinations of random fruits/vegetables/plot devices/cliches that come together to form a whole. Some salads taste great, but then you have your broccoli-and-Nutella salad that’s made up of pure blurg. This book is that salad. While there are great things in it, like, for example, the boat scene, the rest is a mishmash of tired cliches and overused tropes that authors think are timeless but have been, in fact, worn to a frazzle.
Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s okay to use tropes in your writing. But for heaven’s sake, mix it up a little. Enemies-to-lovers? As much as I hate it, that’s fine to utilize as long as you do something other writers haven’t done with it. That, in my opinion, is Children of Blood and Bone‘s biggest problem: It’s overstrewn with tropes that the author uses the beta version of. Creativity? Nada. Plot complexity and unpredictability? Look somewhere else. In short, this book brings nothing new to the table called YA fantasy.
👎 Plot and Pacing
I feel like I can Google ‘teenage girl finds out she is magical but magical people are persecuted in her world so she finds a way to rebel against the government and restores equality’ and come up with 3,394,324,234,467 results before I finally see the words Children of Blood and Bone. In fact, there’s even a name for this: the ‘Oppressed Mages‘ trope. Everything in this book has been done before. Everything in this book has been done before, better. Did we ever doubt that Zélie was going to get the Magical Ritual Items Needed to Save Magic? Or that she was going to fall for Inan? You can literally predict see plot advancements coming from a mile away, and I’m myopic.
The other thing that bugs me, other than the lack of originality, is the urgency – or rather, lack thereof. At the beginning of Children of Blood and Bone, it’s pretty clear that the main characters have two weeks (or something like that, I can’t remember the exact time frame) to restore magic to their world. You know, so they can defeat the Evil Magic-Hating Government™. And for the most part, the main characters do act with the deadline in mind. Except for the part when they sing and dance and fall in love with the very person they’re trying to kill. Which is to say, half the book. Like, girl, I’m not even concerned about the deadline, because you clearly aren’t.
😑 Characterization
If there is a particularly good thing about this book that should make you absolutely have to read it, it’s the characters. Haha just kidding. The characters aren’t anything special, though they do come close. Okay, fine, Amari and Tzain come close. But Zélie, the main character we, unfortunately, have to be stuck in the head of for half the amount of pages? Not so much. It’s not that Zélie is a bad or incapable protagonist. Wait, hold on, she is an incapable protagonist. Well, she at least she can kick ass…until she comes in close contact with a dick and falls head over heels in love…
Dear reader, is it too much to ask for a female protagonist to have an agenda and f!cking stick to it? Well, gee, I know I want to evade the clutches of my worst enemy whose father murdered my mother…huh…he’s kinda hot…Evading him? Pshhhh. And the ‘worst enemy’ in question isn’t even that well developed. Inan’s chapters were a mess of OMG this girl is so talented/sexy/[insert synonym here] and OMG this girl sucks kill her killher killherkillerekielr. Like, dude. Why are you always thinking about girls?
On the other hand, Amari was a pure joy to be in the head of. I loved her relationship with Zélie, and I also loved character development and how she went from being a timid little girl to a motherf!cking lionaire yass queen!! This was the sort of development I missed from Zélie and Inan. Respond to your challenges! Rise above them! I am a firm believer in your main character growing and learning from adversity and Children of Blood and Bone just went like ‘meh whatever I’ll write Zélie a proper arc later.’ LIKE A PROCRASTINATOR. #NotDoingHomework
😑 World-Building
Since I am clearly not Nigerian or of Nigerian descent, I cannot comment on real-world accuracy (though according to some reviews coming from the Nigerian community, it’s indeed not exactly true to Nigerian folklore). But whether it’s accurate or not, Children of Blood and Bone suffers from lack of description. There are worlds that I can see in vivid detail, and then there are world’s that fade into nothingness and white noise in the depth of my muddled memory. The world in this book is a lot like the latter type. Would a paragraph or two describing the Orïshan world hurt?
I teach you to be warriors in the garden so you will never be gardeners in the war.
The magic system, like most everything in this book, is unoriginal and underdeveloped. For me, the each-magician-controls-a-certain-element-type magic system has been so horrendously overused that in order to stand out, you need a little, memorable quirk that makes your particular system different from the rest – and no, the glorious white magi hair doesn’t count seeing as it’s the equivalent to heterochromatic eyes is the equivalent to silver blood is the equivalent to blue skin.
Final Thoughts
You have to give some credit to Children of Blood and Bone: as reminiscent to bathing in lukewarm waters as it was, I managed to finish it. And it wasn’t a big mess. Was it a mess? Kind of. But not a gigantic, all-encompassing, chaotic mess. I liked it enough to give it three starts, at least. If you are fairly new to the YA fantasy genre, give it a try. If you are a seasoned fantasy reader, this boring book doesn’t have your best interests at heart and you should immediately run away to the land of Leigh Bardugo.
Happy Reading! Love, A n n i e ❤❤
