“You are a once in a generation talent,” says Tomi Adeyemi, tears in her eyes. The author is not paying me a compliment; she is reading a line from one of her numerous fan letters.
Adeyemi is a New York Times bestselling writer, a feat she accomplished at twenty-four with her 2018 fantasy debut novel Children of Blood and Bone —the first in her Legacy of Orïsha trilogy, which marries old-fashioned American YA with West African mythology. Her new novel, The Siren —released in September—follows Emery, a freshman at Dartmouth desperate to find her place as she undertakes a series of trials to join the titular group of powerful girls on campus.
This is Adeyemi’s first time since childhood not writing fantasy; maybe her first time period, since she says the first book she ever wrote was a Parent Trap fan fiction. But it’s also an attempt to move past the widely successful young-adult fantasy with which she made her name—as well as the drama surrounding the film adaptation of Adeyemi’s debut novel, an experience she has called the worst thing she ever lived through.