Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone Will Ruin and Heal You

Some stories grab you by the collar. Others slip quietly into your bloodstream and stay there long after the last page. Tomi Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orïsha trilogy somehow manages to do both.

It’s loud and soft. Brutal and warm. Mythic yet painfully familiar. You read a line, and suddenly you’re thinking about home, about history, about power, about the people you’d burn down worlds for.

This isn’t just a fantasy trilogy. It’s a reckoning. A love letter. A scream. A mirror.

There’s a moment in Children of Blood and Bone where the world literally shifts, not because the scenery changes but because the truth of the maji is laid bare. Adeyemi doesn't introduce magic as a parlour trick or a shiny worldbuilding add-on. Magic is identity. Memory. Lineage. It’s the thread connecting ancestors to the living.

The ten maji clans each carry divine power: life, death, water, fire, time, mind, disease, animals, light, darkness, air, and somehow Adeyemi makes all of this feel alive without overwhelming you. The Yoruba-inspired cosmology feels textured. Lived-in. Like you could close your eyes and almost hear the incantations humming under your tongue.

But there’s a heavier undercurrent: magic in Orïsha is not merely mystical, it is political. It has been criminalised, buried, hunted. And this oppression shapes everything. Every choice. Every wound. Every rebellion.

Because in Orïsha, legacy is both a gift and a burden. And every character carries it differently.

Zélie Adebola and the Cost of Becoming

Zélie is one of those heroines who is too fiery, too flawed, too stubborn. She’s angry because she should be. Afraid because she has every reason to be. And brave in the way real people are brave: not because she wants to be, but because the world gives her no other choice.

There’s a kind of trembling honesty in her journey, the push and pull between power and pain. The responsibility she never asked for. The grief she tries (and fails) to outrun.

Adeyemi writes her with this raw, almost frantic tenderness. You feel her exhaustion. Her hope. Her guilt.

And through her eyes, magic becomes more than ability; it becomes inheritance. It becomes a fight to reclaim what was stolen from generations before her.

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The trilogy does something bold: it refuses to romanticise rebellion. There are no clean revolutions here. No tidy victories. Everything costs something.

The Iyika uprising, the violent backlash, the fractured loyalties… Adeyemi pulls readers into the chaos that erupts when power shifts too fast and without warning. In many ways, the trilogy becomes a case study in how systems push back when the oppressed gain ground.

You watch alliances form and crumble. Families torn apart by ideology. A kingdom learning (or refusing) to reckon with its sins.

Thematically, the books ask uncomfortable questions:

• What do oppressed people owe to their oppressors, if anything?

• Is violence a necessary language when peaceful pleas go unheard?

• When the old world falls apart, who gets to build the new one?

The Emotional Fault Lines Between Characters

One of Adeyemi’s sharpest strengths is how she writes relationships, not perfect, not predictable, but deeply human. The tension between Zélie and Inan (and the haunting consequences of that tension), the steady presence of Tzain, the shifting roles of Amari, the sisterhood, the betrayal, the fragile trust… it all feels like something you could eavesdrop on.

But beneath the romance and the friendships is a central question: How do you love someone whose very existence threatens your own survival?

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A Nigerian-Inspired Fantasy

There’s something exciting about seeing African cosmology treated with the same reverence Western fantasy gives to dragons and medieval lore. Adeyemi writes in Yoruba terms without pausing to over-explain. She weaves West African textures, foods, hairstyles, weapons, and traditions into the bones of the story. Not as decoration, but as foundation.

The trilogy carries the echoes of real histories: colonisation, genocide, state violence, and the weaponisation of fear. But instead of flattening these themes, the books invite readers to wrestle with them, gently in some places, violently in others.

At its core, the Legacy of Orïsha trilogy is about the reclamation of power, identity, and story. It’s about how generational wounds shape nations. It’s about what happens when the very magic designed to protect a people becomes the reason they’re hunted. It’s about love in impossible circumstances.

Tomi Adeyemi didn’t simply build a fantasy world; she built a legacy that reminds readers (especially Black ones) that their stories can be mythic, magical, and revolutionary all at once.

It’s messy, emotional, imperfect… and all the more potent because of it.