Children of Virtue and Vengeance is the second Legacy of Orisha series book. I read the first book – Children of Blood and Bone – a couple of years ago and liked it a lot. Still, I wasn’t fully vested in the story, and it took me quite a lot of time to prioritize its sequel. I picked it up and dropped it many times before racing to finish it.
I don’t blame a reading slump for struggling to finish this novel. This book genuinely has a lot of problems with it. Read on to know why this book didn’t quite work for me.
Book Synopsis
After battling the impossible, Zélie and Amari have finally succeeded in bringing magic back to the land of Orïsha. But the ritual was more powerful than they could’ve imagined, reigniting the powers of not only the maji but of nobles with magic ancestry, too.
Now, Zélie struggles to unite the maji in an Orïsha where the enemy is just as powerful as they are. But when the monarchy and military unite to keep control of Orïsha, Zélie must fight to secure Amari’s right to the throne and protect the new maji from the monarchy’s wrath.
With civil war looming on the horizon, Zélie finds herself at a breaking point: she must discover a way to bring the kingdom together or watch as Orïsha tears itself apart.
Children of Virtue and Vengeance: My Review
It’s probably the middle book syndrome that plagues so many YA dystopian/fantasy trilogies. I can’t remember the last time I liked the second book in a series.
So, I made allowances for this book – I went in expecting it not to be too great. It still managed to disappoint me. Here’s why:
- The beginning is very abrupt. It’s hard to put my finger on what exactly the issue is, but the beginning is pretty jumpy and all over the place. Amari and Zelie are all over-dramatic and one-note. These two girls are supposedly very different from one another. However, their narrations are written in the same style. To me, this was a major issue. However, as the action started to ramp up towards the middle of the book, I was able to overlook this issue.
- The plot seems derivative. If this book had come out a couple of years earlier, it would have had a bigger impact. However, a particular plot twist with Amari’s story was also one of the biggest plot twists in one of the hugest TV shows (Game of Thrones) last year. What should have been an exciting/thrilling section was just ho-hum.
- The characters. I liked Amari and Zelie in the first book. But here, they were just so damn annoying! They are stubborn; each thinks they know the only way to save the kingdom. And they topped each other doing stupid shit! There was way too much teenage drama thrown in as filler.
What I did like about the book were the action-filled sequences and their slight unpredictability.
Overall, this book just worked for me in parts. At its core, this is a book about a country torn apart by civil war, which sounded very interesting to me. However, I do wish that the treatment given to the book was a little more coherent. In an interview (I can’t find the link now, unfortunately 😔), I heard Adeyemi wasn’t delighted with this book and rewrote it multiple times. I can make out that’s true just by the jerky quality of the writing.
Have you read this book? What did you think of it? I was disappointed but still have high hopes for the series, which is why the four stars. Overall, this series is still terrific, even though a big part of this book was a dud for me.
I wasn’t as wild about the first book in this series as I wanted to be — it was fun and engaging for sure, but maybe not to the level that I expected based on the marketing push it got. I have def not been inspired to pick up the second book, though I admit that’s partly because these books are incredibly long whereas I, by contrast, am old and tired. 😛
if you weren’t thrilled by the first book, you would definitely be bored by the second one 🙂