Children of Anguish and Anarchy is the final novel in the Legacy of Orisha trilogy by Tomi Adeyemi.
Finished on: 5.10.2024
[Here are my reviews of the other two books in the trilogy.]

Content Note: slavery

Plot:
The battle between the maji and the nobles of Orisha for the crown gets interrupted when foreigners from the tribes of Baldeirik, the Skull King, abduct all the maji and titans they can get their hands on, looking for one maji in particular. Among those taken are Zélie, Amari, Inan and Tzain. Zélie realizes that she is the one the Skull King is looking for, but there is another that they need to find, an Zélie has to make sure that she gets to her before the Skull King can realize his plans.

Children of Anguish and Anarchy is not a bad book, but it is a bad sequel, feeling more like a reboot of the series than an actual conclusion to what came before. Thus it falls short for fans of the series and yet remains incomprehensible for those who aren’t familiar with it. I wonder what happened there.

Already at the end of the second novel, the change in the narration is hinted at, so to say that it came completely out of nowhere is untrue. And yet, I thought that this change would tie into the plot and established characters – like Roen – much more closely. It did not. Instead it keeps introducing new elements, and one of the most important one, and not a small element at all – the nation of New Gaia and its people – have never even been hinted at before. It made me suspect that Adeyemi herself had no idea where the story would be headed, not even in a broad sense.

It makes the novel stand apart from the rest of the trilogy, and that is an unfortunate thing for something that should feel like a conclusion that ties things up more or less neatly. There are characters that seem forgotten, struggles that become entirely irrelevant. And on the one hand, that’s fair – faced with an existential threat, smaller fights can become less important, even if they seemed almost all-consuming before. On the other hand, as reader, this is absolutely unsatisfying. Especially since the pacing is off, the first part dragging on and the final parts feeling hurried.

That being said, there are many interesting ideas here. I loved that we finally got to hear a little more from Tzain an that he becomes more of a character here. I loved even more that Amari’s queerness is finally acknowledged, even if the romance she has feels a little hurried, too. There are some cool new magic elements here, that had me really excited. New Gaia in general was a really interesting new world to explore, even if I kind of wish that she had explored it in another series instead of shoehorning it into this one.

So, there was a lot to like in the book and there were certainly interesting parts and things that I have been waiting for since the beginning. But overall, this conclusion comes with a sense of discontent that wasn’t strictly necessary, I think. More could have been made from it for the series as a whole.

Summarizing: well, that’s that.