Children of Anguish and Anarchy
Children of Anguish and Anarchy Book Review by Tomi Adeyemi
This book was so horrible.
No one is more disappointed than me to say that.
I’ve gone to two of Tomi Adeyemi’s book signings, including a recent one for Children of Anguish and Anarchy.
Tomi Adeyemi herself is absolutely wonderful. She’s so intelligent, hilarious, addictively charming, and can work a room like no other. The book signing was fantastic. Too bad the book couldn’t hold up to the event itself.
Children of Anguish and Anarchy follows as the third and last installment of the Legacy of Orisha trilogy, but doesn’t read like that at all.
Other than having the same four main characters of Tzain, Zelie, Amari, and Inan, nothing about the book concludes any issue, plot story, or character development from the previous two novels.
A completely new villain is introduced, someone we haven't heard about as a reader in the last two books whatsoever, and obliterates any of the conflict and tension that Adeyemi worked so hard to build in her previous stories.
Gone is the tension and literally hundreds of years of in-fighting between the Maji and the monarchy, gone is the civil war and its repercussions on Orisha, gone is even one of the main characters from the last novel, Roen, who was a significant love interest for Zelie and who has been completely disappeared in this new book all together (like, what???).
It was incredibly lazy writing to wipe away everything the first two books created in order to “unite” against this new enemy. The sentiment is nice, but it’s not the finale we wanted or needed.
I desired answers to Amari and Zelie’s broken friendship, closure to the Inan and Roen love triangle, a verdict on how Orisha would rebuild and who would rule.
We get none of that.
Instead Zelie and the others spend half their time in the book on a ship with very strong slavery parallels, and the other half in the introduced land of New Gaia.
While I thought the descriptions of New Gaia were beautiful (albeit very similar to Avatar), I was dissatisfied because the whole series at this point has been focused on Orisha and Orisha’s problems, not New Gaia and not the Skulls.
While the plot was bad and aggrieving, the characters were even worse.
None of the characters were interesting. They were carbon copies of each other in which all they talked about was avenging their fallen Orishan people, killing the Skulls, and protecting loved ones.
Rinse and repeat. It was boring as hell to delve into four different characters’ minds only to find that they all sounded exactly the same.
I often had to go back to the start of the chapter to tell whose internal thoughts I was reading because they were so interchangeable and self-righteous and dull. It is never a good sign when you can’t automatically tell who’s POV you’re reading based on their internal dialogue and tone.
Lastly, the pacing of the book was atrocious. Everything happened so goddamn fast that I felt like I never had the chance to properly digest or internalize anything.
Oh they’re on a ship? Moving on from that. Zelie got some sort of medallion shoved into her chest?? Moving on. Wait, Maji and Titans and the monarchy are all working together after two full books of them killing each other??? Five pages and it’s done with.
It was outrageous and insulting.
The pacing made everything feel shallow, unimportant, and unnecessary. More than most of the plot were action scenes, while difficult to write and interesting in their own right, in this book it was so repetitive that characters killing other characters 90% of the time became egregiously tedious.
And speaking of the action, I also found it incredibly violent and graphic for a YA book. As someone who is not a fan of gore and blood, this book had so many explicit details for no reason other than being gratuitous.
For example, at one point Zelie shoves a chicken bone through someone’s cheek. I found it repulsive and it was also incessant.
I know some people can handle brutality, but I can’t, and found it a huge turn off and made me dislike the book so much more, especially as this was a majority of the book to boot.
Disappointment can’t even contain my full feelings for this story. For such a wonderful trilogy to succumb to such a terrible end is a tragedy. I wish the best for Tomi Adeyemi and success for her future, but I will not read another book by her again.
Score: 2/10
Recommendation: Read Children of Blood and Bone, a magical story that will inspire and entertain you. Read Children of Virtue and Vengeance if you really need something else, but even this book I wouldn’t recommend picking up.
Do not, I repeat, do not read Children of Anguish and Anarchy. It will leave you feeling dismayed and disheartened beyond redemption.
