Review: Children of Anguish and Anarchy

Children of Anguish and Anarchy by Tomi Adeyemi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"It's been 84 years..."

And it's been worth one of the longest waits in YA history for this, the end of the Legacy of Orïsha, picking up on the dreadful and horrifying cliffhanger of Children of Virtue and Vengeance four and a half years ago.

I haven't been a bookseller since before Covid, but when this book arrived in my mailbox, I was able to set it aside just long enough to take it to work for lunchtime reading. And I managed to read through all of it in that hour, with the sort of energy I haven't had since my bookseller days at Stanford, an energy I used to save for Marie Lu books (especially Warcross and Wildcard those first two summers.)

With a newly expanded world map to show the great distances traveled in this book, our four (!!!!) POV characters (with Tzain now joining the ranks alongside Zélie, Amari, and Inan) go from Orïsha to the islands of the Tribes of Baldeírik (the home of the Skulls, straight up Viking raiders abducting maji by the millions and menacing our heroes in Old Norse), as well as New Gaīa, a land of a new kind of magic, whose culture and volcanism resemble Hawaii but with Portuguese as the local language (which makes sense since Adeyemi got her primary inspiration for this series from the West African diaspora in Brazil while she studied there.)

It's unusual in that it's the shortest book of the trilogy, and that each successive book in this series was shorter than its predecessors - which also means that a small number of plot threads unfortunately do get left hanging, a fan favorite character in particular. That aside, the book's stratospheric stakes and endless action fly fast all the way to the very last page.

With the announcement that Gina Prince-Bythewood (of The Woman King fame) would be directing the film adaptation, I can see that Adeyemi was preparing GPB for the job. Given how the Skulls abducted maji in the exact same way as white Europeans transporting enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, and Inan showing this to his mother as proof that Orïsha must unite against a common threat, this book in particular definitely touches on some of the same thematic elements as The Woman King did, so my expectations for Prince-Bythewood's film adaptation are very, very high.

To the Legacy of Orïsha, I now declare ave atque vale, and hope that Adeyemi's next move is to write a New Gaīa spinoff, because that's one of the most interesting fantasy lands I've ever seen and she's really only scratched the surface with its unique potential.

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