Book Review: "Children of Anguish and Anarchy"

Tomi Adeyemi brings her magnificent YA fantasy trilogy to a close with a bang, even if the story itself feels a bit rushed.

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I remember being blown out of the water when I read Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone back in 2018. It was like a breath of fresh air, with its unique spin on African mythology, its ability to address complex philosophical and moral questions, and its complicated and morally dubious protagonists, particularly its daring and . Now, at last, Zélie’s adventure comes to a close with the third volume, Children of Anguish and Anarchy. While there are some justified criticisms–many of which have been raised by others–overall it’s a thrilling and exciting book that both brings the existing story to a close and opens up some fascinating roads for future work.

When the novel begins, Zélie, Amari, Tzain, and Inan have all been taken captive by a sinister group known as the Skulls whose leader, King Baldyr, seeks to use Zélie’s magic for his own foul conquest. Adeyemi spares no details when it comes to depicting the horrors of the slave ships, and this makes for tough reading. I can see why some reviewers took the novel to task for indulging in it. After all, it’s not as if there’s any shortage of slave narratives, all of which focus on Black misery and pain. However, it serves a purpose here in that it helps to establish the stakes of Zélie’s fight: if she doesn’t defeat Baldyr, then he will do the same to all of the people that she loves and many more, besides.

As the novel proceeds, Zélie’s fate intertwines with another extraordinary young woman, Mae’e, who is also the target of Baldyr’s relentless thirst for conquest and power. We get some fascinating insights into New Gaīa, the country Mae’e inhabits. If anything, I would have liked to have spent some more time here, and the same goes for Baldyr’s land, which is only sketched in very light detail. It’s always a risky proposition to bring in a new character this late in the game, and it’s even riskier to propose her as a love interest for a character that we already know and love. Adeyemi, however, is skilled enough to make Mae’e an immediate favorite, and I enjoyed the chance to Amari finally lean into her sapphic longings (even if this leads to poor Tzain getting his heart broken).

Indeed, there’s also more than a bit of heartbreak to this novel and, not to give too much away, but not everyone makes it out of this particular story alive. Such is the power of Adeyemi’s prose and story, however, that the deaths that do happen feel earned and feel that they got the sendoff they deserved. After all, what’s an epic fantasy story without sacrifice? 

Likewise, Adeyemi is truly a master at worldbuilding. There are times when you can truly lose yourself in the potency of her prose, both during the early chapters when our heroes are stuck on that dreadful ship amid death and stench and misery and when they travel to the beautiful land of New Gaīa, which is truly a bit of a paradise. I would have liked to have spent more time in these new worlds–with their complex magic systems, their fascinating structures, and their equally fascinating inhabitants–but I’ll just have to hold out hope that Adeyemi has plans to come back to this world in the future.

This isn’t to say that Children of Anguish and Anarchy is perfect, and I do find myself agreeing with some of the criticisms that others have lodged. It’s a relatively slim volume–coming in at less than 400 pages–and as a result there are times when it feels quite rushed. Some characters who were given a lot more development in earlier books are now jettisoned altogether, leaving one scratching one’s head and wondering just what happened to them. Perhaps this is just the inevitable result of such a long gestation period (the last volume, Children of Virtue and Vengeance, was released all the way back in 2019), but one would have thought that someone along the process would have raised an eyebrow or two.

This sense of being rushed is particularly noticeable at the climax and the denouement. The final duel with Baldyr happens so quickly that it’s almost a blink and you’ll miss it moment, which is hardly what one expects given how much agony and torture Baldyr has inflicted on Zélie and those she loves and given that he’s an existential threat to not one but three different continents. For that matter, the Skulls aren’t given nearly enough development, especially since they’re the big bads of this installment. We’re often just asked to take things on faith.

If I had to distill all of this criticism, I would say that Children of Anguish and Anarchy tends to lean too much into telling rather than showing what’s happening. While this isn’t always a bad thing–it has its place in fictional storytelling, if done with moderation–here it tends to be used to excess. This is particularly vexing given the extent to which earlier volumes in the series have gone to such great lengths to sketch out this world and its magical and political systems. In this book, however, enormous set-pieces are dispensed with in favor of glossing narration, and the book as a whole suffers for it. 

Thus, even though Zélie and her companions have vanquished this new threat, there are still  many questions left unanswered. What will happen to Orïsha now that the old systems have been totally demolished? How do they rebuild after so much heartache and destruction? Is it even possible or desirable to rebuild? While certainly not all of these questions needed to be answered in this book, I personally would have liked to see a few more chapters at least sketching out what a future might look like for this sundered nation (or, better yet, an entire fourth volume).

Even so, Children of Anguish and Anarchy, and the larger Children of Orïsha series, is a triumph of epic storytelling. I’m very much looking forward to what she writes next!