Blood Scion
Blood Scion
“Look around you,” Faas says. When none of us move, the commander just juts out his chin. “Go ahead. Look.”
For the first time since I was sorted into the squad, I regard the other recruits with little more than a fleeting glance. My gaze tracks down the pack, taking in the lanky frame of the boy a few feet away. A freckle-faced girl stands close to his side, so close I wonder if they know each other. Off in a corner, separate from the rest of the group, another girl with dark brown skin and a head full of tight coils fixes her beady eyes on the commanders, never once breaking contact.
“If you haven’t noticed already, there are ten recruits in this room.” Faas’s voice is strangely calm, bored even, as if his next words shouldn’t come as a shock at all. “I only have room for nine.”
It takes a few seconds for the meaning to register. When it does, my eyes dart from one recruit to another. One of us is going to die.
The commander lets his haunting words sink in. Then he continues. “The squad is only as strong as its weakest soldier. A dead weight could mean the difference between life and death for the entire team. Since there are ten of you, that means there’s at least one recruit in this room who isn’t as committed to the cause as the others. So today’s decision is yours. Find your weakest link. Get rid of the dead weight. Training begins now”
Blood Scion is a captivating and original novel from first-time author Deborah Falaye. The story draws on Yoruba-Nigerian mythology to tell a gritty story of colonization and rebellion. Sloan Shade is only 15 when she is drafted into the colonizer’s army to fight an endless war against her own people, the Yoruba, and particularly a subset of the Yoruba people, the Scions, who are capable of magic. The Lucis colonizers hate and fear the Scions and have been fighting the Shadow Rebels for Sloan’s entire life to rid the world of Scions. Unbeknownst to the army commanders, Sloan, herself, is a Scion with the power to create fire, and she plans to use her time at the army training camp to uncover the truth about the fate of her mother who disappeared two years ago. Sloan struggles to control her powers at the training camp while being subjected to the tortures and endless horrors of the brutal army training. Sloan’s quest to discover the fate of her mother brings her unexpected friends and allies and leads her to discover secrets she never imagined.
Blood Scion is a story of brutal colonization and child soldiers. Sloan is repeatedly put in kill or be kill situations, and she struggles to survive while attempting to retain a sense of her own humanity. The story is very violent at times though the descriptions are never gratuitous. Not all readers will be comfortable with the level of violence experienced and perpetrated by Sloan. The first half of the book is a seemingly endless series of horrors experienced by Sloan in her village and then at the army training camp. For much of this, Sloan is very passive; she struggles to endure the training camp and is unsure of her next steps. The second half of the novel sees Sloan in a much more active role. She accepts her own Scion powers and becomes more willing to use them to survive. Once she discovers the truth of her mother’s fate, her own plan for her future begins to crystalize, and she more actively works to achieve her goals.
This story of African colonization told through the lens of speculative fiction is refreshing and original. While Blood Scion is violent and brutal, it is also an enjoyable page turner with a winning and complex protagonist.
Tara Stieglitz is a librarian at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta.