Cover of Children of Blood and Bone

Children of Blood and Bone

core novel 2018 Legacy of Orisha

Record

First published2018
Original language EN
Work typenovel
Canon statuscore
Reader rating4.10 (259,301 ratings, collected 2026-09-14)
First-edition ISBN9781250170972

Synopsis

Children of Blood and Bone opens the Legacy of Orisha trilogy in the kingdom of Orisha, a land inhabited by non-magical kosidan, who hold ruling power, and divîners, who carry the potential to become magic-wielding maji. Eleven years before the story begins, King Saran discovered a way to suppress magic entirely and orchestrated a massacre of defenseless divîners, including the mother of the protagonist, Zélie Adebola, leaving the divîners persecuted and magic seemingly gone from the world. Zélie, who has the rare potential to become a Reaper maji able to command spirits of the dead, sets out alongside her brother Tzain and Princess Amari, who has fled the palace with a stolen scroll capable of restoring magic, to complete a ritual using the scroll along with a bone dagger and a sunstone before King Saran's forces can stop them.

Where it sits

Notes

  • From the series record (Legacy of Orisha): New author record. A completed West African/Yoruba-mythology-inspired YA trilogy, one of the best-selling YA fantasy debuts of its decade. Children of Blood and Bone's audiobook won the 2019 Audie Award for Best Audiobook (Fantasy) and was a Kirkus Prize finalist -- both are adaptation/format-specific honors for the audio edition and the book's own critical reception, not a genre fiction award for the prose text itself, so noted here in prose rather than registered as an `AWD-####` row; no Hugo/Nebula/World Fantasy/Locus/British Fantasy recognition was found for any of the 3 books.

Neighbouring works

Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.

Sources

← Legacy of Orisha dossier · All universes

Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.