In the Shadow of the Fall
Tobi Ogundiran
Hardcover/ eBook
ISBN: 9781250907974
Tordotcom, July 23 2024, 160 pgs

Ashâke should be a priestess by now, but while all of her peers have ascended into service, she’s still an acolyte, toiling away at menial tasks in a remote, isolated temple. Desperation leads her to try to call on the orishas directly, but instead of binding the gods to her will, Ashâke discovers incredible things about the state of the spiritual world and her place in it. All of this leads her on a quest full of surprising truths, new friends, and frighteningly nasty villains.

There are so many things to love about this novella (the first in a planned duology), starting with the world it’s set in. One of the wonderful things about the growing popularity of novels by Nigerian-American fantasy writers like Tomi Adeyemi, Jordan Ifueko, and Tochi Onyebuchi is that concepts like orisha, ashe, and griot are becoming part of the general cultural collective and don’t need to be explained in detail every time someone creates a fantasy world based on West Africa. We’re approaching a point where writers can lean more into the stories and have a bit more fun. Ogundiran does that here. In many ways, this is a traditional fantasy epic—goofy young hero, deeply evil villains, slowly-revealed epic quest, wide world full of quirky groups of people—but it’s thoroughly grounded in a world stitched out of West African traditions, theologies, and magics. There are lots of words from real West African cultures strewn through the story, from foods and instruments to spiritual concepts and objects. But there are also fantasy elements spun out of whole cloth—odd objects, strange places, and magics light and dark. Mixed together, they create a richness that saturates the story like a good sauce, making every new bite of plot thoroughly satisfying.

Speaking of goofy young heroes, I’ve seen plenty of hapless young men in fantasy, bumbling along asking “Why me?” and rebelling against the status quo for no other reason than to annoy the local mysterious wizard and get the story started. This book has a wizard-annoying, mistake-making, generally immature young woman as the hero, and it works wonderfully. (That she’s a Black African woman is just sprinkles on the cake.) Ashâke is a pain, sure, and she makes plenty of decisions that are more guts than glory—but she has reasons that anyone who’s felt lonely or unwanted can relate to. She does wallow for a bit—after all, what else would get the local mysterious wizard, in this case a foul-mouthed one-eyed witch doctor, to give her cryptic messages to start her quest with?—but when she finally steps into her power, it’s exciting. Good thing, too, because the villains here are pretty scary. Without giving too many spoilers, Ogundiran does a good job of gradually building up the villainry, but it starts in a pretty intense place, with a lone dead-eyed traveler named Yaruddin. Finding out how awful he truly is only amps up the excitement of the novella’s climax, but it also makes the soft cliff-hanger ending a bit unsatisfying. That’s okay, though—it creates space for the next book to start with surprises, hopefully.

Ashâke is the chosen one, bound to gain power and knowledge and focus, and while it doesn’t necessarily feel earned yet, it does fit into a sense of a much larger world happening around our heroine. Here’s hoping the next book takes us further into that world and solidifies her place in it. I’m certainly looking forward to whatever comes next.