{"id":8753,"date":"2018-03-12T14:39:34","date_gmt":"2018-03-12T20:39:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nigerianews.ca\/?post_type=news&p=8753"},"modified":"2018-03-12T17:56:52","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T23:56:52","slug":"video-24-years-old-nigerian-lady-tomi-adeyemi-got-7-figure-book-deal","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/nigerianews.ca\/news\/video-24-years-old-nigerian-lady-tomi-adeyemi-got-7-figure-book-deal\/","title":{"rendered":"VIDEO: 24 Years Old Nigerian Lady (Tomi Adeyemi) Got 7 Figure Book Deal"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has been called the biggest fantasy debut novel of 2018, drawing comparisons with everything from Game of Thrones<\/em> to Black Panther<\/em>, and has netted a movie deal reported to be worth seven figures.<\/p>\n

But Tomi Adeyemi, the 24-year-old Nigerian-American author of Children of Blood and Bone<\/em>, says that such success was the last thing on her mind when she sat down to write her epic tale of an oppressive world where magic has been outlawed.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the past 10 months I\u2019ve spent a lot of time thinking, is this for real?\u201d she says. \u201cI had a lot of different reasons for writing the book but at its core was the desire to write for black teenage girls growing up reading books they were absent from. That was my experience as a child. Children of Blood and Bone<\/em> is a chance to address that. To say you are seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adeyemi is the middle child of three \u2013 her brother is a musician and her younger sister still at college. Her father is a doctor, while her mother runs a group of hospices outside Chicago. She studied English literature at Harvard before heading to Brazil on a fellowship to study west African culture and mythology. It was in South America that the seeds of Children of Blood and Bone<\/em>, the first in a trilogy, were sown.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was in a gift shop there and the African gods and goddesses were depicted in such a beautiful and sacred way \u2026 it really made me think about all the beautiful images we never see featuring black people.\u201d<\/p>\n

She describes the story \u2013 which follows fisherman\u2019s daughter Z\u00e9lie and an unlikely band of allies and enemies on a quest to reawaken magic in the country of Or\u00efsha \u2013 as \u201can allegory for the modern black experience\u201d. It draws inspiration from both west African mythology and the Black Lives Matter movement.<\/p>\n