Let me start this review by saying that I love Tobi Lou with my whole heart. He’s a singer/rapper that I’ve been listening to for ages, and my favorite song of his is Waterboy. I also had heard about Children of Blood and Bone, and was dying to read it. I had absolutely no idea that Tomi and Tobi were sister and brother! That is, until this music video. Check it out for yourself!
Okay back to this book. It’s been sitting on my shelf for about 2 years, I bought it back in 2018 and finished about 40% of it, but put it down because I got busy with my senior year final projects for high school. Now I finally wanted to go back and finish the book, and I enjoyed it …most of it!
Zélie and Tzain have a great brother-sister relationship. They have dealt with the loss of their mother and their dad’s sickness for years, and Tzain is the only one who is “free” since he doesn’t have the white hair of the maji. The maji have been killed and oppressed by the government for years, and things don’t seem to be getting better anytime soon. Zelie doesn’t like her life and has been training her body under the guide of a woman in her village, but those who provide for her continue to be taxed by the government for her existence. One day where she is desperate for money, she meets a girl in need of saving, a girl who has a scroll that could change the lives of all the maji. Amari’s father may be the one trying to eliminate the existence of maji, but she holds the key to saving them. This takes her on an adventure of pain, loss, and persistence as she tries to change her world.
The only thing I didn’t understand from Zélie’s intro was how she was training with Mama at all. If the government wanted to control the maji, how were they allowed to train for fights? It didn’t really make sense to me, someone in the comments please explain what I missed if this made sense to you.
Amari and Tzain were the best budding relationship in this book. Tzain obviously had a soft spot for her from the moment he saw her, but it didn’t feel too much like insta-love to me. I think that they could truly blossom into a beautiful couple later in the series.
Nevertheless, I didn’t like Amari much. She literally doesn’t care how her actions are putting people in danger/killing people for a good portion of the book. She doesn’t even attempt to acknowledge this fact most of the time! She does grow a lot in this book, but she was definitely sheltered. She couldn’t even realize how dangerous things were after she sees her beloved servant/friend killed at the very start of the book.
There is a lot of pain and trauma in this book from the maji being oppressed for so long. Some of the pain that Zélie carries was hard to read, as it seemed similar to pain that people carry in this world today. Seeing how that pain weighed down on her mind was hard to read. But parallelling that pain was the beauty of the villages full of people that they meet on their journey. I hope that we see more of the beauty that this world has to offer later in the series.
The couple I hated was Zélie and Inan. Zélie deserves better, and I hope that couple dies as soon as it seemed to sprout up in this book. Zélie needs a strong maji partner, or anyone who isn’t seeming to help the government more than he hurts the government.
Overall, the book left me with mixed feelings. I loved the premise, I love the beautiful parts of the book, I enjoy how the pain and trauma is actually deeply discussed, and I love the description of magic and the characters involved in the world of the maji. But some of the characters irritated me, and I ended the book feeling just a little excited for the next book in the series rather than dying to read it. I would still recommend this book to anyone looking for a new fantasy novel, as this might just not be the perfect one for me. So many people love this book with their whole heart!
Overall Rating: 3 out of 5 books.
