Children of Virtue and Vengeance (Legacy of Orisha, 2)

Product Information

a b "Children of Virtue and Vengeance | Tomi Adeyemi | Macmillan". US Macmillan . Retrieved 2021-08-21.

Edited 2/14/2023: I decided to lower this to one star. I didn't like this and I won't be returning to this series.I really liked their sibling relationship ... well up until the moment Amari didn’t even give her brother a chance to explain himself and decided to go into full war mode. What happened to the benefit of the doubt? I mean of course we wouldn’t even listen to our sibling. Why should we? We want war, so we’ll throw all caution and every reasonable and sensible thought out of the window and just go for it! Despite us trying to find a peaceful solution for 3 quarters of the book! Sure. Totally logical, right?! Can you still follow me? Nope? Well, I guess that might be because I couldn’t follow that logic as well. But here we go! When Zélie wakes up, she realizes that she and her companions are in chains and are on a slave ship drifting on the ocean. And the sequel ends there. For a brief moment, she is supportive of Inan being the king and tries to work with him. However, things happen that cause her to lose her trust in him, so she reverts to her obsession with becoming The Best Queen Ever. She also decides that she must kill her mother and brother to secure her reign. Now, Zélie struggles to unite the maji in an Orïsha where the enemy is just as strong and magical as they are. When Amari's mother forms an army of royals with newly awakened powers, Zélie fights to secure Amari's right to the throne and protect the new maji from the monarchy's wrath.

When everything blows up in this book, guess who gets an existential crisis? All of them characters. Overall, Children of Virtue and Vengeance exacerbated everything I didn't like about the first book, and cut out the elements that I loved from it. The characters, plot and relationships regressed and it hurts my heart. I was bored for most of the book and when I wasn't, I was sad. Not because of emotional moments, but because of how disappointing this sequel was.

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The restrictions in the magic system that was introduced in the first book? They don't apply to everyone anymore! Magical abilities that previously did not exist? They just appear and are explained away with "oh, these were gifts given by the gods." The close sibling relationship between Tzain and Zélie? Gone because Tzain's only role in the sequel is Amari's love interest. The unlikely friendship and mutual respect between Zélie and Amari? Poof, gone with the wind. In fact, it's the relationships that suffered the most in Children of Virtue and Vengeance, be it romantic or familial or platonic.

Children of Virtue and Vengeance is the stunning sequel to Tomi Adeyemi's New York Times-bestselling debut Children of Blood and Bone, the first book in the Legacy of Orïsha trilogy. The fact that Inan is alive. REALLY? You couldn't have come up with another way to handle the 'plot' that he carried. It's so dumb to me that he is alive. Children of Virtue and Vengeance was the gripping sequel to Children of Blood and Bone. I enjoyed it overall, although it suffered a bit of 'second book syndrome'. It took the story to new heights and the consequences of their actions were graver than ever before.I think I made myself clear. I waited too long, Readers, fans, lovers of fantasy, first book’s admirers, likers, reviewers, everyone waited TOO LONG. We got invested, we felt for this characters, their growing up, their challenges, their purpose, their fight, the feminist manifesto, unconventional, rebellious acts hid behind their actions! Children of Virtue and Vengeance begins with an unexpected twist. Though Zélie has restored magic to the oppressed people of Orïsha, the monarchy and military now have magical powers, too. Why was it important to you to show people who abuse their power gaining even more?

Though her work is “dark as hell,” it is often sanitized in comparison to the inhumanities she’s learned about in the real world. The concepts she broaches, however, are never dumbed down, one of the grievances she has of other books within the Y.A. category. She knows her readers are smart. They crave literature that they can see themselves reflected in. It’s one of the reasons they can’t put Adeyemi’s work down. Wait!” Amari calls from behind. She sprints down the iron ramp of the warship that’s been our home since the sacred ritual. Her soaked, white tunic is a far cry from the ornate geles and gowns she wore when she was Orïsha’s princess. It clings to her oak brown skin as she meets us at the thrashing tides. The world-building was spectacular in this book as it was in the previous one. I think it is impossible not to carry on with a world like that once you constructed it. So that is a happy aspect of the book. Speaking of the war itself… wow, what a wild ride. We get to see betrayals and trust issues at the forefront. Everyone seems to have their own agenda, even when they are fighting on the same side. I liked that it showed the disagreements and clashes. The book also talks a lot about how it is almost impossible to separate your agenda from your own personal emotions and feelings – which is something I don’t think gets enough spotlight. I also liked that we get to see truth and lies layering on top of each other until even the ‘bad people’ look good sometimes, and the ‘good people’ look bad. There can be grey area in everything and on each side.I said it after reading the first book and I’ll say it again: Their love story came out of nowhere and it’s still irritating af. *lol* Amari clearly was in love with Binta and no one can persuade me otherwise. I find it weird that she would fall for Zane like that and that he’d become her safe haven in such a short time. Also their love ended as abruptly as it started, which only causes me to be even more irritated by their relationship. At first she is everything for him and the moment she does something horrible and stupid he drops her like a hot potato because that is EXACTYLY what we do with the people we love! We can turn our feelings on and off like a light switch, don’t you know?! It must have been true love! Oh jeez, my sarcasm is showing today. I just can’t with this book! I can’t! I have read some spoiler tags for the book's later content, so I know that the characters do much more heinous things before the end. I'll add a Content Warning/Spoiler Warning below for those who are interested.