Where Fantasy Meets Black Lives Matter

A much-anticipated young-adult debut taps into a tradition of speculative fiction rooted in African culture.

- Vann R. Newkirk II

IF A “BLACK LIVES MATTER – inspired fantasy novel” sounds like an ungainly hybrid—a pitch gone wrong—think again. The seven-figure book advance and movie deal bestowed a year ago on Tomi Adeyemi suggest the opposite: a convergence of themes likely to appeal to a very wide audience. Adeyemi, whose Children of Blood and Bone is the first volume of a projected trilogy, is a 24-year-old newcomer to the thriving market of young-adult literature, where demands for greater diversity of authorship and subject matter have lately been loud and clear. The Nigerian American writer isn’t a pioneer, though. Instead, her high-profile debut calls attention to an under heralded tradition. The creator of a mythical land called Orïsha, Adeyemi taps into a rich imaginative lineage as she weaves West African mythology into a bespoke world that resonates with our own.

For at least five decades, writers such as Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler, among other leading figures of the movement known as Afro futurism, have worked African traditions into their prizewinning science fiction and fantasy. More recently, legends of the orishas—divine spirits of the Yoruba brought to the New World by slave ships centuries ago—have found their way into YA fare. They have been put there by black writers well aware that speculative fiction has always been about more than magic and clever devices. Explorations of social power and possibility drive its plots and shape its characters, and young-adult fiction in particular has thrived on instruction through enthrallment.