Review: Beasts Made of Night (Tochi Onyebuchi)

I finished this book yesterday after languishing over it for nearly a week. I only sat down to it maybe
four times and each time I kind of dreaded it, I hate to say.

When you’re trying to scavenge for your one meal of the day, you can tell how valuable something is by how people treat it, not by what’s written down as its price.

Taj is a sin-eater, one of the "aki" who have the ability to kill and ingest sin-beasts, an anthropomorphic manifestation of sin/guilt brought forth by a mage from a person. Kos and its rulers have an obsession with purity (absence of sin), and this is how they get it. Obviously, this costs $$, and so the mages charge for this service, and give the aki a poor cut. The blurb insinuates that Taj will be caught up in palace intrigue after eating a sin of the king, but loljk, he gets banished to an aki training camp until he's finally caught up in a conspiratorial plot in the last 80 pages of the book. ???

The Good

• Nigerian influence was the biggest redeemer of the book. I loved the slang and the food (seriously I just realized this is the first time I ever read a description of eating chicken wings)
• the worldbuilding/mythology in general is very solid
• there are elements of drug/tobacco use (why is that good julia??) i think there's a tendency in YA fantasy to leave out the weaknesses of the world we actually occupy when in reality they can lend to an intricate and more familiar portrayal of a fantasy world

The Bad

• oy vey, someone was transparently on deadline near the end of that one. NO foreshadowing/character development/inclination of the coup that surfaces in the last ~80 pages. i like to be surprised by small reveals, not reveals of the entire climax
• the narrative style was tough for me to get over. Taj is very casual, so much that this felt more appropriate for middle grades. this was the biggest detractor.
• this book desperately needed an editing overhaul. there were so many parts that needed expanding, so many that needed trimming, and so many sentence-to-sentence contradictions (like someone had rearranged by structure without reading the content), it made me sad

Loved it:

• pepper soup sounds really good. i didn't really love anything else.

Hated it:

• i hate that i took the time to finish this rather than moving on, gah

2/5 stars on Goodreads for this one. i see a sequel out and about. maybe if i have nothing else to read...