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A review by lesserjoke
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
4.0
This is a dense and somewhat oblique fantasy tome, richly steeped in mythic history from across Africa. It's sprawling and recursive, nesting stories within stories within stories, resulting in an epic closer to the original oral tradition of that genre than the more modern style popularized by Tolkien. It is definitely not "an African Game of Thrones" as some of the early marketing materials have suggested… If anything its tale of a powerful warrior recounting his larger-than-life exploits bears a passing resemblance to The Kingkiller Chronicle, but even that is fairly imprecise.
I'm grasping for comparisons here because this is such a weird novel, and I'm honestly not sure whether I like it or not. There's very little in the way of a conventional plot, and although the characters bounce off each other in fun ways, their succession of betrayals and reconciliations grows rather numbing after a while. I don't know if I'll bother with the next two books in this trilogy, which author Marlon James has suggested might largely retell the same events from different -- yet equally unreliable -- points of view. But I'm definitely impressed with his vision, and this narrative of a gay intersex black man adventuring across a folkloric landscape is incredibly vivid and distinctive.
[Major content warning for graphic violence and sexual content, including genital mutilation, torture, child abuse, bestiality, and rape. There's a tendency for the fantasy genre to be considered aimed at young adults by default; this is emphatically not such a book.]
I'm grasping for comparisons here because this is such a weird novel, and I'm honestly not sure whether I like it or not. There's very little in the way of a conventional plot, and although the characters bounce off each other in fun ways, their succession of betrayals and reconciliations grows rather numbing after a while. I don't know if I'll bother with the next two books in this trilogy, which author Marlon James has suggested might largely retell the same events from different -- yet equally unreliable -- points of view. But I'm definitely impressed with his vision, and this narrative of a gay intersex black man adventuring across a folkloric landscape is incredibly vivid and distinctive.
[Major content warning for graphic violence and sexual content, including genital mutilation, torture, child abuse, bestiality, and rape. There's a tendency for the fantasy genre to be considered aimed at young adults by default; this is emphatically not such a book.]