‘Children of Blood and Bone’ Author Tomi Adeyemi Announces Sequel

Link to the original article on Walker’s Legacy

June 7, 2018

After securing a reported seven-figure book deal with Fox 2000 and Temple Hill Productions for Children of Blood and Bone, New York Times Best-Selling author Tomi Adeyemi has announced a sequel, Children of Virtue and Vengeance, to be released in 2019.

The first book of Adeyemi’s trilogy was released in March 2018 and was positively received, most notably for its representation of Black characters in a fantasy novel. In an interview with Vox, Adeyemi said “Writing this, there was the personal mission, what I would do if no one ever read it. And then there was the knowledge that hey, maybe many people will read it and see it. And both of those combined so that I just wanted to emphasize the beauty of blackness.”

Released only a month after the debut of Marvel’s Black Panther, Children of Blood and Bones is contributing to a movement of more stories written by and about Black people which she describes as “a whole new world.”

“A lot of those books happening today, like The Hate U Give or Dear Martin or Belles, it’s just finally feeling a part of something I love,” Adeyemi said. “It’s what I felt as a kid.”

Although it is a fantasy novel, Adeyemi makes it a point to acknowledge the metaphor to the real-life Black experience, including police brutality, and while she hopes it continues to be an inspiration for young Black people she understands there is still a larger conversation that needs to be had on Black representation.

“We can’t Obama this, where we have a black president, so suddenly racism is cured, and then eight years later Nazis are marching and people start saying, ‘Maybe we have a race problem'”

Said Adeyemi in an interview with The Guardian. “Our books aren’t there to magically fix publishing but maybe they’ll start the changes moving so that in six months we’ll have even more great stories, where we see ourselves and are heard.”

Children of Virtue and Vengeance is currently available for pre-order here.