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language: English
country: Nigeria
year: 2023
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy, young adult
dates read: 5.12.23-14.12.23
I finally finished Ehigbor Okosun’s Forged by Blood. I was really looking forward to it but unfortunately ended up disappointed. a lot of this I think comes down to a marketing disconnect: it’s being sold as adult fantasy but reads as extremely YA/teen. if I’d known going beforehand that the protagonist is only eighteen I probably wouldn’t have bothered. there was one 30-ish-page sequence in the middle where there were like five successive dramatic parentage / heritage reveals, for three main characters.
the writing is fine (only one glaring copyediting failure — someone is described as having a “penetrative gaze” rather than a “penetrating” one) but it didn’t grip me stylistically. the world-building is also fine, although I still didn’t find it particularly gripping — I feel like people are still so enthralled by the encounter with anything that’s not just modern-projection-of-medieval-Europe that they lose sight of the fact that Oyo is just…Nigeria. there’s Benin City and Lokoja and people speak Yoruba — like, that’s what it’s called in-world, as well as being the language used within the text. using real-world languages to stand in for fictional ones can be cool (I liked the way Kai Ashante Wilson played with this in The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps), but that wasn’t what was happening here. meanwhile, fake-Iberia, fake-Northern Europe, and fake-East Asia all got made up place names. just feels weird! there were some other small things that jumped out at me, too, most notably the part where it presumably accidentally implies you can cross the continent in a matter of hours in a horse-drawn carriage.
the politics were interesting but the end felt a little flat — like Queen of the Conquered in the way it was thinking about complicity, but without Queen of the Conquered’s eventual turn to outright revolution (and in fact explicitly rejecting this in favor of trying to repurpose existing political structures).
I think if you like teen/YA fiction and high fantasy you will probably enjoy this more than I did! but, alas, it was not for me.
moods: adventurous, tense