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mediaeval-muse · 3 years

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Book Review

Beasts Made of Night. By Tochi Onyebuchi. New York: Razorbill, 2017.

Rating: 2/5 stars

Genre: YA fantasy

Part of a Series? Yes, Beasts Made of Night #1

Summary: In the walled city of Kos, corrupt mages can magically call forth sin from a sinner in the form of sin-beasts – lethal creatures spawned from feelings of guilt. Taj is the most talented of the aki, young sin-eaters indentured by the mages to slay the sin-beasts. But Taj’s livelihood comes at a terrible cost. When he kills a sin-beast, a tattoo of the beast appears on his skin while the guilt of committing the sin appears on his mind. Most aki are driven mad by the process, but 17-year-old Taj is cocky and desperate to provide for his family. When Taj is called to eat a sin of a royal, he’s suddenly thrust into the center of a dark conspiracy to destroy Kos. Now Taj must fight to save the princess that he loves – and his own life.

***Full review under the cut.***

Trigger/Content Warnings: violence, blood, body horror

Overview: There were so many things about this book that I would have usually been very interested in: a Nigerian-inspired fantasy, an intriguing magical premise, a political drama, etc. I was very excited to pick it up, and I was looking forward to a something a little different from the run-of-the-mill YA fantasies I’ve been reading lately. While I think the story started ok, I quickly found that the book as a whole felt more like a draft than a finished piece. There wasn’t much attention paid to building a plot; everything seemed to meander until the last third, when suddenly, all the action was dumped on us all at once. I would have been able to appreciate it had more care been given to setting up stakes and having scenes build on one another earlier in the book, but unfortunately, it didn’t feel like Onyebuchi had a plan from the get-go; he seemed to have been writing without a sense of what his story was going to be until the very end. While I really enjoyed the idea of “sin eating” and all the potential stories that could arise from that premise, the book as a whole just didn’t come together in a way I found satisfying. Thus, this book only gets 2 stars from me.

Writing: Onyebuchi’s prose is fairly typical for a YA novel in that it describes things in a straightforward way, focusing on actions more than emotions or complex nuances within the fantasy world. Beasts Made of Night is also like a lot of YA fantasy in that it is told in first person, which means that, by nature, some descriptions and narrations feel awkward or unnatural. First person is tricky because humans don’t consciously register certain things that need to be included in a novel in order for a reader to understand the action, and I think Onyebuchi falls into this trap sometimes. This isn’t necessary his fault; I think all first-person narration has this hurdle, and some writers overcome it better than others.

Plot: The main arc of this book follows our hero, Taj, as he attempts to navigate the political world after eating the sin of the king of Kos. I found the premise incredibly compelling, but unfortunately, the execution didn’t quite click for me. The main conflict doesn’t take off until around page 80, which means that for nearly the first third of the book, we spend a lot of time following Taj as he just lives his life in Kos. To some extent, following a character’s daily life can be a good way of orienting a reader in a fantasy world, but after a time, I wanted the main conflict to start.

Once Taj ate the king’s sin, it seemed like the story was finally going to start, but unfortunately, it didn’t. Taj doesn’t really disclose what the sin was or how his knowledge of it affected his status in the kingdom. I would have thought that will such an abnormally giant sin-beast, there would be some kind of political plot revolving around the king, but instead, Taj is simply taken into the palace as the royal family’s personal aki, and he spends the next third of the book not doing much of anything.

After a while, he is sent away from the palace so he can train an army of aki, and even that plot starts to drag until the final 60ish pages, when Taj is involved in a plot to take over the royal palace. The last third or so of the novel seemed to dump all the action on us at once, and most of that is conspiracy that has already taken place off-page - Taj just gets invited along for the ride (because he develops some new abilities? Because he’s the chosen one? I don’t know). I personally didn’t find it very compelling because none of the major events were set up in the first two-thirds of the book, making everything feel as though it were happening at random for plot twisty reasons. I also don’t think the plot was a very smart one, which made the plan to take over the palace seem poorly-planned.

Characters: On the whole, the characters were a mixed bag for me. Taj, our protagonist, is interesting in that he’s a little cocky and has that fun attitude of “I-hate-that-I-care.” I was really looking forward to seeing how his character would develop over the course of the novel, but he didn’t seem to change all that much. I also wish Taj had had some kind of deeper motivation that affected his actions throughout the book. For example, we understand that Taj wants to send money back to his family, but we don’t get a lot of descriptions of him being homesick or feeling lonely - things that would make this goal feel more important and which would hit differently when we read about him being essentially alienated from his fellow aki because of how successful he’s been at sin-eating. Instead, Taj feels rather aloof and disinterested in trying to form a found family, and I couldn’t quite understand what it was that was driving him other than mere survival (which is fine, but survival on its own in insufficient for me).

Taj also seemed to act in ways that didn’t quite make sense; for example, he seemed unfazed by the “Baptism,” an event in which the government razes an entire neighborhood to the ground if it feels the area is too sinful. In the first 80 pages, Taj gets caught up in a Baptism, but afterwards, brushes it off and goes smoking with his friend, Bo. I would have understood if Taj had gone to cope with the horror he saw, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like “oh, well, time for a night out.” Absolutely no exploration of how witnessing the Baptism affected him afterward.

Many side characters also didn’t seem to have a clear arc; they merely drifted in and out of the story as needed. Bo was supposedly Taj’s close friend, but he and Taj don’t have that many scenes together which showed that (I was told more than shown). Arzu, Taj’s bodyguard of sorts after he enters palace service, is kind of fun, but her arc isn’t really that important to the plot. The king is barely involved except for the sin-eating and the very end, and the princess (Taj’s love interest? Maybe?) is awkward without clear motivations. Even Izu (a mage), Aliya (another mage), and Zainab (a fellow aki), who have direct influences on Taj’s life and are major players in the big plot, don’t seem to be given much room to shine. Perhaps this was to keep the plot twist of the last third of the book secret, but it felt like they didn’t really have a use until then.

It also didn’t feel as if Taj was truly bonded to any side characters. Despite scenes of joking around with Bo or protecting Omar, a young aki that is discovered on the day another aki dies, I didn’t really feel that these relationships were important. I was told that they were, but because we get so few scenes where Taj builds trust or confides in people, I never got the sense that he truly connected with anyone - not even the princess, who he supposedly falls in love with (or in lust with?) for no reason.

I think more work could have been done to solve the problem of useless side characters by making their motivations or goals more clear (or at least sprinkled more hints and seeds) throughout the entire novel, not just all at the end. As the book stands, Onyebuchi spends a lot of time describing the setting and characters’ actions, and while he makes clear that the aki are second-class citizens and some people in the palace want things to change, he doesn’t really tell us what his characters want, how they act to achieve these goals, and how the events of the book (or how Taj himself) threaten those goals - at least, not until the end. I think if more was shown to us instead of told, with scenes more clearly building on one another, characters would have had more fulfilling arcs and the plot as a whole would have felt more suspenseful.

Worldbuilding: Aside from the sin-eating, Onyebuchi creates a magical world full of sensual experiences. It seems like gems and precious stones are everywhere, but aren’t necessarily valuable as currency; instead, they symbolize family ties and add splashes of color to an impoverished world. There is also a kind of smoking lounge with aromatics such as apricot and mint, while the sounds and smells of the markets bring Kos to life.

While all these elements captured my interest, I think the book would have benefited from a bit more structure when exploring the relationship between the outcast aki and the people around them. It seemed to me that the aki were a necessary scapegoat in that they were simultaneously needed and shunned by society. They are kept in poverty and often suffer from exploitation, with no way of demanding fairer treatment. While this was all well and good for establishing class dynamics, I did want some more explanation of why the aki were so powerless. Why couldn’t they, say, form some kind of union and refuse to eat sins unless they were paid fairly? Seems to me that threatening to kill them could work, but eventually, the royals would run out of aki, and without their services, things could go downhill pretty fast.

I also wish figures like the inyo or the arashi had been more integral to the story, as I kept forgetting what they were until the very end. These figures are mentioned a lot, but I never really felt like they were part of the world because they don’t really make an appearance, nor does belief in them seem to affect the action.

TL;DR: Beasts Made of Night has an intriguing premise and is set in a marvelous fantasy world, but unfortunately suffers from poor plotting and characters with unclear arcs and motivations.

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