Children of Virtue and Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi

Because I was having anxiety attacks every time I was getting into my car and that’s every day. So, I had to write about it as self-therapy. I felt like that wasn’t being talked about, even within black communities.

The whole thing started out as me wanting to explore the emotional PTSD of feeling like maybe I’m not Trayvon Martin, maybe I’m not Sandra Bland, but there’s nothing that separates me from being Sandra Bland. Both novels are bruising accounts of unthinkable violence and persecution, evocative of bigger, real-world conversations about suffering and survival. In the sequel, Zélie discovers that the progress that she made in the first book has complicated ramifications, leading the kingdom toward a brutal civil war. In the novel inspired by West Africa, Adeyemi’s protagonist teams up with a rogue princess to help fight the monarchy, which mercilessly wiped out magic years before in order to gain more power.

“It’s a violent Snuggie, but create the Snuggie.”Īdeyemi’s first book, which came out in 2018 and has spent 90 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, transports readers to the kingdom of Orïsha, where teenager Zélie Adebola is determined to bring magic back to her oppressed people. “I was thinking: you’re creating a Snuggie,” the Nigerian-American author tells TIME. Her young adult novels-the hit epic Children of Blood and Bone and its highly anticipated new sequel, Children of Virtue and Vengeance-combine escapist fantasy with clear-eyed confrontations of race and power. Tomi Adeyemi wants to wrap her readers in a “dangerous but warm” blanket.

Children of Virtue and Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi