Children of Virtue and Vengeance — Legacy of Orïsha, Book 2

Children of Virtue and Vengeance Review

The second volume of Tomi Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orïsha trilogy opens in the immediate aftermath of Children of Blood and Bone’s resolution: magic has been restored to Orïsha, but the restoration is messier than the revolution that achieved it. The maji have their powers back — but so do the kosidan nobility, the class that previously used those same powers to oppress them. What Zélie and Amari achieved is not a new order but a new conflict with more dangerous weapons on both sides.

This is, structurally, a more difficult novel to write than its predecessor. Children of Blood and Bone had the clarity of a quest narrative with a definable goal. Children of Virtue and Vengeance must sustain a civil war while navigating the deteriorating relationship between its two central protagonists — and it does so with more sophistication than the middle-book curse might lead readers to expect.

The Fracture Between Zélie and Amari

The most important development in the novel is the rupture between Zélie and Amari. In the first book, their alliance was forged through shared necessity and genuine affection. In the second, what each has experienced and what each has become diverges along lines that make trust increasingly difficult. Adeyemi does not manufacture this conflict for drama — it grows from who both characters actually are and what the events of Book 1 required of them.

Revolution’s Second Morning

The novel’s most sophisticated theme is what happens after a revolution succeeds: the oppressed acquire power, and the question of what they do with it does not have a clean answer. Adeyemi refuses to let her maji characters be simply heroic, and refuses to let her kosidan antagonists be simply villainous.

When the Oppressed Gain Power

The deepening of this theme is the book’s real achievement. In Children of Blood and Bone, the moral lines were relatively clear: an oppressed people fighting to reclaim stolen magic. Here, the restoration of magic to both the maji and a faction of the nobility — who become tîtáns — scrambles those lines entirely. Suddenly the formerly powerless must decide whether to wield their returned power for justice or for vengeance, and the temptation to become the thing they fought is everywhere. Adeyemi, whose series has always been an allegory for racial oppression and Black resistance, refuses the comfortable fantasy in which the righteous simply win. She asks the harder question: how do you break a cycle of violence when both sides now have the means to annihilate the other, and when the memory of atrocity makes mercy feel like betrayal? That she poses this without preaching, and without flattening any faction into pure villainy, is what lifts the trilogy above standard YA fare.

A World More Fully Realized

The sequel also benefits from no longer needing to introduce its world. Orïsha — Adeyemi’s vibrant secondary world drawn from West African, and specifically Yoruba, mythology and culture — comes into richer focus here, its pantheon of gods, its clans of maji defined by distinct magical disciplines, and its geography all rendered with greater confidence than in the debut. The action sequences are crisper and more spatially coherent, and the magic system gains texture as new abilities and factions emerge. This cultural specificity remains the series’ signature gift: epic fantasy too long dominated by pseudo-European settings here draws its imagery, names, and spiritual framework from a tradition rarely centered in the genre, and the result feels genuinely fresh even when the trilogy structure is familiar.

Zélie Carries the Cost

At the center of it all is Zélie Adebola, and the sequel is largely a study of what survival has done to her. The trauma she endured in the first book — torture, loss, the staggering weight of having become a symbol of the resistance — has hardened her, and Adeyemi is unflinching about the toll. Where the debut’s Zélie was driven by hope, this one is driven increasingly by rage and grief, and her bond with the gods, the source of her power, becomes more fraught as the war demands more of her. Her fracturing relationship with the conflicted prince Inan, and her diverging path from Amari, are not melodrama but the natural consequence of a young woman asked to carry an entire people’s liberation before she has finished growing up. Zélie’s exhaustion and moral struggle give the political abstractions a beating human heart.

Fantasy With a Purpose

It is worth remembering what Adeyemi set out to do. She has been explicit that the Legacy of Orïsha grew out of her grief and anger over anti-Black violence and police brutality in America — that the maji, hunted and brutalized for what they are, are a fantasy refraction of the Black experience, and that the magic-suppressing “Raid” and its aftermath are deliberately legible as allegory. This gives the trilogy a moral urgency rare in commercial YA fantasy, and Children of Virtue and Vengeance, with its agonized inquiry into vengeance, justice, and whether the formerly oppressed can avoid replicating their oppressors, is where that purpose becomes most sophisticated. The book is entertainment, but it is entertainment with something genuine and painful on its mind, which is precisely why it resonates beyond its genre.

A Strong Middle Book, With Middle-Book Costs

Children of Virtue and Vengeance is one of the better second installments in YA fantasy precisely because it resists the simplifications that would have made it easier, but it pays the standard middle-volume taxes. It cannot stand alone — readers must be invested in the trilogy to feel its payoffs — and a few new point-of-view characters are thinner than the returning cast, while the romantic subplots occasionally interrupt the political momentum. It also ends on a genuinely brutal cliffhanger, the kind that recontextualizes the whole book and leaves Zélie’s story at its lowest point, a gut-punch made harder by the long real-world wait for the concluding Children of Anguish and Anarchy. These are the costs of an ambitious bridge novel, and they are worth paying for what the book accomplishes.

Reading Order

1. Children of Blood and Bone (2018)
2. Children of Virtue and Vengeance (2019)
3. Children of Anguish and Anarchy (2024)

Our rating: 4.2/5 — One of YA fantasy’s better second books, earning its moral complexity across both volumes and resisting the simplifications that would have made it easier but less honest.