In its structure, Adeyemi’s debut is in many ways a classic entry into the realm of YA fantasy, which has enjoyed growing acclaim since the 1980s. Starting in the late ’90s, the Harry Potter books fueled the momentum, as did Suzanne Collins’s critical and commercial hit of 2008, The Hunger Games, which was quickly followed by two more volumes. Watching the cinematic adaptation of Collins’s trilogy, Adeyemi told Teen Vogue, was the catalyst for her own allegorical world building. She wanted to respond to the racist backlash against the film version. Some viewers denounced the casting of black actors in prominent roles, prompting Collins to emphasize the movie’s faithfulness to the clearly multiracial world of her novels. Adeyemi set out to create a story with a cast of unmistakably black characters. In Orïsha, she explicitly invokes a non-Western tradition, and at the same time follows the by-now-standard YA format of the multiperspective bildungsroman: Her three teenage protagonists take turns as first-person narrators of a quest story.

Henry Holt

Children of Blood and Bone also draws on a very different, realist approach that has claimed attention in mainstream young-adult fiction in the post-Ferguson era. Tales of individual trauma were already a 20th-century plot staple of the genre. In her 2017 best seller, The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas highlights a socially engaged variation on that theme. Her novel, which has sold more than half a million copies, grapples with lives in a black community after a fatal shooting by a police officer. Adeyemi’s story calls to mind that plot arc as she intertwines the actions of her deities with the struggles of the characters known as maji, who occupy the foreground. “Adorned with snow-white hair,” they are darker-skinned inhabitants of a land populated entirely by people of color. Once upon a time, empowered by the spirits, the maji were magic-wielders who literally presided over life and death, and commanded the fear and respect of Orïsha’s rulers. But as the novel starts, King Saran reigns over an empire in which skin color dictates status and power. The gentry is lighter-toned and obsessed with skin bleaching, and the maji have been reduced to serfdom and slavery. Often referred to as “maggots” and banned from speaking their sacred Yoruba language, the maji have been robbed of their magic and live in fear of genocide.

Adeyemi is aware that she is unspooling a transparent parable of oppression, as her protagonist, Zélie Adebola, fights against the erasure of her identity. After a series of mishaps connects her to the king’s daughter, Princess Amari, and to a mystical artifact stolen by the princess, Zélie manifests a newfound power: Not only can she access her own particular magical birthright as a maji—the ability to commune with the dead—but she is now galvanized to wield it in a crusade to topple the kingdom. In assigning Zélie the gift of drawing strength from remembrance of the dead, Adeyemi taps into a capacity that has become so important for black protest today.