 Hello, my darling extraterrestrials. I am Kim. This is Dustmotes and Velikor, and I just finished Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. And seriously, if you are looking for a new fantasy to sink your teeth into, this is it. Zellie and Zane were just children when the raid swept through Orisha. Innocent Magi torn from their homes and murdered wholesale, unable to protect themselves because magic was gone. The massacre worked exactly as the monarchy required, leaving only non-magi and diviner children, the magic unmanifested and dead in their veins. But children grow up, and no matter what they might think, the gods have not abandoned them. Zellie and her brother Zane run afoul of the guards when a poorly disguised Princess Amari begs their help. She needs to flee the city with the scroll that she's just stolen, an artifact somehow connected to the gods. The three find themselves on a quest to restore all magic, pursued by Inan, Amari's brother, and the unmitigated wrath of the king. This book is lush and detailed and captivating. It's also quite long, but as you may have noticed, I delight in long books. Also, each main character gets a solid wallop with the character development stick, by which I mean they each have a well-developed arc, interesting and complex backstory, a unique voice, and an individual emotional life. It's very easy with a multi-point perspective novel like this to let the characters just kind of bleed together a little bit just at the edges. But in this one, each character stands very strong on their own, and I really respect that. This book was not written, it was crafted as if at a potter's wheel, and loving hands brought it to life. And since this is so much the character's story, I'm just going to dive right in and tell you all about them. Xaeli is a diviner training with Mama Agba in a secret class that teaches young women how to wield a staff. She has a solid, if childlike, grasp of the danger of the world that she lives in, and she is furious. She has been furious ever since they killed her mother. Hotheaded and disaster-prone, she seems to stumble through life on sheer luck, so of course she stumbles into this life-altering quest. Amari, daughter of the king, knows that the claustrophobia that she feels in the palace that she is never allowed to leave is wrong, and she must sit still and allow her mother to treat her like a doll. That is how you are a good princess. You must submit. Her only joy in life is her best friend, her diviner maid, whose murder changes everything. Amari overhears something pivotal, and all of a sudden she's on the run from everything she's ever known. It's a cruel education, but she grows from a meek, obedient plaything into a fierce young woman, and nothing is more powerful than the moment that she realizes her actions amount to a coup. And she doesn't really have a problem with that. Sane is an athlete, and Xaeli's brother, protector, and supporter. Despite or perhaps because of his lack of the white hair that denotes diviners, he is fiercely protective of his disaster-prone little sister. When Xaeli comes galloping back with a stolen princess and a priceless artifact, there is no question that Sane is coming with them on the quest. He is practicality in the face of magic, he is rational thought in the face of annihilation. And he gets well up to the character development stick too. He has to watch his disaster-prone little sister walk into a catastrophe with her eyes and her arms and her heart wide open. And he can't do anything about it. And then there's Iman, Amari's older brother, heir to the throne, and very thoroughly brainwashed pawn of the king. He is dangerous, volatile, and conflicted. He has been chasing his father's approval since before he understood he didn't have it. Torn between that overwhelming drive and his just now sprouting moral compass, his behavior becomes erratic as he avoids a terrible, necessary choice. Overall, I really enjoyed this book. The only problem I had with it was that all of the species of animals are the same, except they're bigger and they have air written after them. So lion air is a really big lion. All of them are exactly that. She did all of this amazing world building and she didn't even bother to change the names of the animals. I thought that was weird. But seriously, that's the only problem I had with this book. This is a book of oppression and revolution of gods and men and of coming of age in really dangerous times. There's a lot of buzz about this one too. It's listed as in development on IMDb, so there's that. There are also two sequels slated to come out in 2019 and 2020 and I'm really excited about that. Have you read this book? I know it just came out in March, but if you have, come tell me what you thought in comments and don't forget to subscribe. Aviento!