Children of Anguish and Anarchy by Tomi Adeyemi: Review by Eugen M. Bacon
Children of Anguish and Anarchy, Tomi Adeyemi (Henry Holt 978-1250171016, $22.99, 356pp, tp) June 2024.
As a reader new to Tomi Adeyemi, I hadn’t read the first two books in the Legacy of Orïsha trilogy, before approaching Children of Anguish and Anarchy. I don’t believe it affected my reading experience, because the novel, while part of a trilogy, clearly allows for new readers.
An eye-catching cover paves the way to an illuminating map and a chart of the Maji clans, familiar characteristics of the series. Backstory contextualizes each character and their past, allowing the reader to stay abreast of this cross-cultural series, and invested in the closing story. It opens with our protagonist Zélie, a captive in a hanging cage on one of the Skulls’ ships, as she reminisces of the snowcapped mountains of Ibadan and, in a quiet prayer, ‘‘Help me,’’ beseeches the help of goddess Oya to save her from this predicament.
Sectioned into five parts, 81 chapters and an epilogue, there’s much to love about the fantastical and magical Children of Anguish and Anarchy. Published as young adult, this novel has a wealth of vivid first-person narration imbuing a oneness with nature (rains, storms, waves, mountains), spectacular battle scenes and a strong sense of place, comprising jagged silhouettes of village huts in the horizon, seas pushing against damp walls and the creaks of hanging cages, let alone the starry skies and vine-covered settings of New Gaia, and it will appeal to an adult readership.
We get to understand the import of kindred and family in a battle for Lagos, where enemies must come together to combat a common foe. Short, swift chapters in alternating voices bring us intimately close to Zélie and her brother Tzain, then her foe and love interest Inan and his sister, Princess Amari.
We learn the hierarchy of the Skulls, from bronze to silver to gold, and what happens when magicked metal is fused into a ribcage and feeds on innate power. We encounter strange beasts in Nailah the lionaire, Zélie’s ryder, and made-up language infused with Latin, and a vicious antihero in King Baldyr, who seeks godliness through the transformation of a trinity. He must find a girl, but so must the rest – keen to follow a compass and an ancient voice, to thwart his ambitions. Prophesies, magic – even in the call of an axe – an imperial palace, blood oaths and more feed on power as an ancient voice guides Zélie to a predicable victory.
The text is vivid, even in its fast pace, and the reader can find immersion in its scenery that contains crashing surf, chirping birds, lurching vines heaving out of black sands in malevolent nature. Some narration unravels as stories-within-a-story (embedded vignettes) that give the book a feel of freshness all the time. Magic, vine weaving, pace, adventure and titillating battle scenes hook the reader start to finish in chapters full of death, love, honor, devastation and hope.
This final book in the Legacy of Orïsha is an adrenalin fest. The reader barely has time to settle into the story before another battle scene erupts, then another. It’s as if there’s an urgency to close out the series with as much conflict as it can take.
First-person voice, well-applied, is a powerful tool for immersing a reader, but the reader might stumble in this book where each alternating perspective takes on the first-person voice. It means hopping from head to head in that ‘‘I’’ voice, and having to remember or look up at all times which ‘‘I’’ this is: Zélie, Inan, Tzain, Amari…. For an immersive reader like me who tends to ‘‘feel’’ a character in the story, channelling them across the storytelling, these perspective jumps can dilute the experience. Tomi Adeyemi makes the reading easy with character-named chapters – a consistent feature in the acclaimed series.
Adeyemi’s skilful use of backstory makes it easy for a reader to pick up the series – like I did – with this stimulating final book in the Legacy of Orïsha trilogy. But it is probably more rewarding to first read Children of Blood and Bone and Children of Virtue and Vengeance to fully experience this book.
Children of Anguish and Anarchy is fast-paced, relentless in its action scenes and offers a compelling and decisive conclusion to a series that has made its author renowned and multi-award winning.
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Eugen M. Bacon, MA, MSc, PhD, is African Australian, a computer graduate mentally re-engineered into creative writing. She studied at Maritime Campus, less than two minutes’ walk from The Royal Observatory of the Greenwich Meridian. She’s a 2022 World Fantasy Award finalist, and was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Her book Danged Black Thing made the 2021 Otherwise Honor List as ‘a sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Eugen has won or been commended in international awards, including the Foreword Indies Awards, BSFA Awards, Bridport Prize, Copyright Agency Prize, Horror Writers Association Diversity Grant, Otherwise, Rhysling, Elgin, Aurealis, Australian Shadows, Ditmar and Nommo Awards for Speculative Fiction by Africans. Eugen’s creative work has appeared in literary and speculative fiction publications worldwide, including Award Winning Australian Writing, Fantasy Magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction. New releases: Mage of Fools (novel), Chasing Whispers (collection), An Earnest Blackness (essay collection).
This review and more like it in the August 2024 issue of Locus.
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