Children of Blood and Bone is a 2018 young adult fantasy novel by Nigerian-American novelist Tomi Adeyemi. The book received one of the biggest young adult publishing deals ever, including preemptive sale of film rights to Fox 2000 Pictures. Debuting at number one on The New York Times best-seller list for young adult books, the novel received mostly positive reviews.
About Children of Blood and Bone in brief
Children of Blood and Bone is a 2018 young adult fantasy novel by Nigerian-American novelist Tomi Adeyemi. The book received one of the biggest young adult publishing deals ever, including preemptive sale of film rights to Fox 2000 Pictures. Debuting at number one on The New York Times best-seller list for young adult books, the novel received mostly positive reviews. Critics wrote about its examination of oppression, racism, and slavery, with the kosidán and maji serving as stand-ins for real-world groups. It is also a coming-of-age story as the characters discover their abilities to help shape the world through their actions. The entire editing process took eighteen months to complete, going through 45 drafts. The idea for the novel came after a trip to Brazil and the African gods and goddesses were depicted in such a beautiful and sacred way. She drew inspiration from Yoruba culture and Western fantasy fiction like Harry Potter and Avatar: The Last Airbender and from both West African mythology and the Black Lives Matter movement. She wanted to write a story so good even racists would want to read it. She became so exhausted through the non-stop work of the writing that she became disoriented, even at one point thinking she was a lawyer. She worked hard to map out the distances between cities and the time it would take them to travel between them. She also had to figure out parallels to her imagined world, which would exist in a world without white people. She got help from her mother at times for things like naming the spells that involved naming the Yoruba language.
She came to be represented by Alexandra Machinist and Hillary Jacobson of ICM Partners, a publishing agency that matches emerging writers with mentors and editors to revise their work before submitting it to literary agents. Adyemi entered Pitch Wars, a competition that matches writers with editors and mentors to revise work. She was ultimately forced to complete in a month to enter it in a writing competition, which was where she felt it needed to meet her expectations. She wrote the book while bingeing the television show The Good Wife in the background. She had a desire to write an epic tale with roots in West Africa was matched by her desire to respond to police brutality. For Adeyemeni there was no option but for the book to be successful and perfect, given the pressures placed on black creators. She did not like when she was called the ‘black J. K. Rowling’ instead of phrases like ‘the new J.K. Rowling\”. She also wanted to build a complete world, though she did not prefer to take a horse and take a lion to take them between cities. She has also cited the books Shadowshaper and An Ember in the Ashes as primary inspirations. The novel is the first book in a planned trilogy and follows heroine Zélie Adebola as she attempts to restore magic to the kingdom of Orïsha, following the ruling class kosids’ brutal suppression of the class of magic practitioners.
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This page is based on the article Children of Blood and Bone published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 14, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
