2020 #3: Children of Virtue and Vengeance (Legacy of Orïsha #2) - Adeyemi

Children of Virtue and Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, I am disappointed that I am disappointed. 404 pages of the "Children of the Gods" not learning from their mistakes. And perhaps that is the point? Maybe we are all doomed to be victims of our own hatred?

I would have liked this second book in the Legacy of Orïsha to dig into the time of discovery that evidently took place after the climactic ending of Book 1. I wanted to know more about tîtáns, the Maji, the Iyika, reapers, burners, tiders, etc... Adeyemi deftly invited us in with the first book, giving us three characters whom we might really care about. In Book 2, however, she doesn't really follow up on the loose ends of the mythology, introduces characters who seem a bit "after-the-fact" (e.g. Nehanda), and seems to have a plot structure comprised of battles and little else. Again--I get that the war is tireless, but it doesn't necessarily make a convincing narrative for a book. I love that the characters are all flawed (that's a generous description in some cases), but there seems to be so little growth. They all make shades of the same mistakes. Over and over and over again.

But I haven't walked away regretting this reading experience. Adeyemi's gift for description and characterization has not faltered here. While I found myself frustrated with the same conflicts bouncing back and forth between the three main characters, I am still invested. I want to know where they are headed. I want to be invited back to the world of purples and golds. But I hope that the third book will let me stay awhile before the fighting begins. There's more to say about what lies behind the strife. There's more to tell us about what will be lost before we actually lose it. These are stories of truth-telling and testament, but they are still stories that have invited us to translate the lessons of a different world into our own. I'm not asking for a redemptive ending, but I hope Book 3 will help us dig in and invest a bit more into that different world so that the universality of the themes are illuminated even more clearly.

My review of Book 1 Children of Blood and Bone