It is an arresting image: her face fills the frame, unsoftened by a smile, her piercing gaze fixed directly on the viewer. Using an author portrait on the cover of a novel is highly unusual, and a decision that Adeyemi says is a statement of ownership. After 12 years spent inside the world of Children of Blood and Bone – the first book in the YA trilogy that made her a literary star and its film adaptation which has become a source of profound distress – Adeyemi wanted this book to belong unmistakably to her.
Children of Blood and Bone, her 2018 debut, became a publishing phenomenon, netting a major seven-figure deal and debuting at No 1 on the New York Times young adult bestseller list. Its story of Zélie, a young woman fighting to restore magic to the kingdom of Orïsha, was inspired by West African mythology and offered something Adeyemi had craved as a child: a dark-skinned Black girl at the centre of an epic fantasy. The success brought its own mythology.
Adeyemi was not merely a successful young writer; she became, she feels, a symbol of what the next generation of Black YA literature might be, something she felt the weight of acutely. And so few of us are given a shot at all, so for the last 12 years there’s been this sense of carrying everyone.” Readers would tell her what the book had meant to their children. Such responses were moving, but also difficult to know what to do with.
Now, with The Siren, Adeyemi has moved from epic fantasy to something more contemporary. The standalone novel follows Emery, a Black student arriving at Dartmouth College determined to leave her troubled past behind. She is drawn into a mysterious sorority of “Sirens” and desperate to fit in.
In some ways, Adeyemi says, the book is deeply personal. She wrote her first story at five – a Parent Trap fan fiction because, she says, she “wanted a twin and a horse”. She then spent years trying not to become a writer.
Her parents had moved to Chicago from Nigeria in their early 20s, and Adeyemi grew up with the ethos of relentless achievement that often comes with first-generation immigrants – one that does not take kindly to creative pursuits. She considered medicine, investment banking and consulting, but kept coming back to writing. She moved to California and began working part time at a film production company in Los Angeles, alongside writing her first novel.
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