Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (4.5 stars)

This is a spectacular Young Adult fantasy debut novel by Tomi Adeyemi, a Nigerian-American. All the characters in the story are black, but the ruling class k'osidan is a lighter shade, and has brutally suppressed darker skinned maji citizens, especially the once-powerful magicians among them.

The author draws heavily on the Black Lives Matter movement, and there are strong themes of colorism, and racism throughout. Adeyemi says her aim was to teach via fantasy, in a non-preachy way:

“Oh man, I’m going to write a story that’s so good and so black that everyone’s going to have to read it even if you’re racist.”

She's done it. If she can follow up the first with a similar second book, the franchise could be huge. Some spoilers ahead.

Zelie is a realist about her world, the parallel in our modern world is drivingwhileblack, movingwhileblack etc:

He wants to believe that playing by the monarchy’s rules will keep us safe, but nothing can protect us when those rules are rooted in hate.

The difference is in this world Zelie gets an opportunity to put someone from the establishment, someone in a position of power no less, into her shoes by living her worst memories via his magic connector power. He almost instantly switches sides in the war, although things get more complicated towards the end.

There's some annoyances, I'm unsure whether to chalk this up to simplification to keep it YA approachable, but these rubbed me the wrong way:

• Major characters get paired up two by into into nice little symmetic relationships, which doesn't seem particularly plausible.
• Practicality of creating a temporary sea in a desert to sail some ships around in a fight to the death just seems laughable. I know the point was to demonstrate excess, but it's still a desert.
• Why didn't they use magic to just steal the artifact? Playing the ship deathmatch contest was just silly. But even worse, when they won what was supposed to be an unwinnable battle the contest owners just handed over the artifact. Why? It's very naive to think that would actually happen in the real world. These cutthroat blood-sport profiteers would just kill them and keep running the show.
• They almost died getting into a settlement of elite ninjas, but then the ninjas threw them a party, forgot to post guards, and the bad guys waltzed in and killed everybody. You can't be elite ninjas one day and dumb tacticians the next.
• The torture scenes seem way over the top for YA.

But it's a great YA read, I couldn't put it down.

4.5 stars