A teen fiction sensation about race and police brutality

By R.L.

ZÉLIE has known persecution all her life. As a child, she witnessed the murder of her mother at the hands of the police. Her father was brutally beaten. Marked out by her hair and dark skin, Zélie is subjected to ghettoisation, punitive policies and slurs. She sees children killed simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She vows to rise up, and change the fate of those like her.

The 17-year-old heroine of “Children of Blood and Bone” may have supernatural powers and live in Orïsha, a mythical land, but much of her experience will feel uncomfortably familiar to American readers. Tomi Adeyemi (pictured), a first-time author who wrote the novel in a month, intended it to be an “allegory for the modern black experience”: “although riding giant lionaires and performing sacred rituals might be in the realm of fantasy, all the pain, fear, sorrow, and loss in this book is real.” There is an almost overwhelming amount of it in its pages, and that is the point. Each incident of violence in the novel has been transposed from footage of police brutality. “If you cried for Zulaikha and Salim,” Ms Adeyemi writes in an afterword, “cry for innocent children like Jordan Edwards, Tamir Rice, and Aiyana Stanley-Jones.”

This is a searing message, but one that audiences seem eager to hear. The advance fee for the manuscript was one of the largest ever paid for a young-adult book, and the publishers’ faith has been amply rewarded—“Children of Blood and Bone” has not left the New York Times bestseller list since its publication in March. Critics are betting on it being the next blockbuster franchise, likening it to “Game of Thrones”, “Harry Potter” and “The Hunger Games”. The next instalments in the trilogy will be released in 2019 and 2020; Fox 2000 has snapped up the film rights for a reported seven figures.

That is not surprising. Though films about slavery have enjoyed critical success, Hollywood is waking up to the demand for challenging contemporary stories about race in light of the impressive box-office takings of “Black Panther” and “Get Out” (demographic data show that those films had a wide appeal, too, attracting black and white viewers in almost equal proportions). An adaptation of “The Hate U Give”, another best-selling young-adult novel, will be released later this year: it tells the story of a teenage girl who witnesses a police officer fatally shoot her friend. Increasingly the victims of racism in America are becoming heroes on the silver screen.