Lion's Blood

A fun and entertaining read. The author tells a gripping tale in a fun page turning way. He writes battle scenes particularly well; ordinarily I'd just read those as quick as I could and skip through but something about his style really worked for me and I enjoyed every word.

My main complaint is the book felt really shallow to me. An adventure story, not a meaningful meditation on humanity. That really jarred with me at first because the book is explicitly an alternate history of American slavery. The first two sections read like a classic slave narrative. And having just read a couple of very thoughtful and moving versions of a slave narrative I was really put off by what to me felt like a shallow treatment. Fortunately the story gets its own momentum and gets increasingly unrealistic as a slave narrative and instead becomes its own thing, more in a classic fantasy vein.

The main character Kai is well written as are some of the side characters, particularly Baratunde. Others like Shaka are crude caricatures. I was particularly let down by his writing of women. Some of the characters are interesting but seldom get a voice. And the most interesting, Sophia, gets reduced to a Madonna/whore sort of thing. She could have been a major POV character and instead she gets written almost entirely out, a real opportunity lost.

Fun book but ultimately doesn't deliver on what it could have been.