Children of Blood and Bone, by Tomi Adeyemi
Synopsis: A paint-by-numbers 2nd world fantasy with medieval Africa flavor rather than medieval Europe flavor.
Book Review: Anyone who was a kid in the 80s will recognize this novel. It’s a basic 2nd world fantasy that fits right in with the pulp fantasy of that era. If you’re a kid, and it’s the 80s, this is ok. Because kids don’t have good taste, and in the 80s this whole 2nd world fantasy thing was still new and exciting and lots of authors were exploring the possibility-space of this newish genre. But I’m not a kid, and the 80s are long ago.
This novel doesn’t have an ounce of ambition. Everything here has been done before so many times that you can see the ruts in the ground as you’re trundling through them. The one difference is that the scenery is African rather than European, and even THAT isn’t new, it’s been done since at least Quest for Glory III in 1992, and likely much earlier via D&D supplements.
What’s worse, Blood & Bone doesn’t even take inspiration from the better stuff of the era, it dives right into the careless schlock. The plotting is actively stupid – things happened not because there was a good in-world reason for them to happen, but because the author decided that they wanted the thing to happen… so now it does. Goons were cartoonishly incompetent, they literally stood around until it was convenient for the heroes to fight them, like in those bad ninja movies. Villains are cartoonishly evil, genociding populations just for the heck of it. There’s the standard pairing-up of the opposite-sex protagonists because they’re opposite sex and protagonists, what other reason does one need?
This reads like a cheap cartoon where the writers didn’t care one whit for making good stories for children, they just wanted to churn out weekly 22-minute animated ads for toys. I haven’t read genre fiction this bad since Grant’s “Deadline”. Not Recommended.
Book Club Review: Not everyone hated this as much as I did. While no one thought it was “good writing,” there are people in our book club that haven’t become jaded grumpy readers, and can still take joy in a silly schlock adventure. You may get a good book club meeting out of discussing differences in tastes, how expectations affect perception, and what different people want out of a reading experience. Plus the haters get to vent some steam by hating, and the non-haters can laugh at them and talk about the fun bits they enjoyed. Still, it’s not really the sort of discussion I think book clubs are seeking, more like something they occasionally stumble into. Not Recommended.
