Tobi Ogundiran, the award winning short fiction author, has produced his debut epic fantasy, the first part of which is the novella, In the Shadow of the Fall. It is a beautifully rendered story about a young acolyte of the orisha whose attempt to commune with the gods triggers a sequence of events that almost brings an end to the world she has been raised in. My only reservation is that this world shaking story is fitted into the confines of a novella that sometimes can’t quite handle the load. But more of that later. First, there is so much to enjoy in the quest of Ashâke to make contact with the orisha of the Nigerian pantheon. There are gods, priests, griots, witches, shape-shifting beings and a strong plot with a lot of action that leads up to a natural pause setting up a second book.
The story begins with the twenty-two year-old Ashâke sneaking out of the temple where she has been raised and trying to summon a god on her own. Bitterly disappointed after five attempts to rise to priesthood and failing each time to hear the voices of the orisha, she tries to achieve the same thing on her own. Of course, this is forbidden by all the rules of the temple and leads to a disaster in which she is nearly killed. After being nursed back to health by a witch doctor, she is taken before the High Priestess where she argues forcefully to save herself from banishment.
“I am two and twenty seasons. I should have acceded five seasons ago. You all know this. What you don’t know—what you cannot know is how it feels to be the only acolyte to be shunned by the orisha, to wonder again and again what you did to deserve this. I have done everything, studied more, I daresay, than any other acolyte. I have dedicated myself to service. There is nothing more I want than to serve the orisha, but I cannot do that if they won’t speak to me!”
In the Shadow of the Fall, Kindle edition, Location 185
Though saved from banishment by the decision of the High Priestess, she is confined for a time to the food cellars deep below the temple. With the help of a bird spirit, she finds a way to escape and marches out of the temple to find her own way in the world. Of course, she is all bravado and has no plan at all for how to survive.
She soon runs into a clan of griots who welcome her with open arms, as they do all stray people in need of a home. The griots carry with them human memory stretching back to its creation, and, when they sing, their music and words put the listener in the midst of the scenes they describe as if they were really there. But when they sing of the fall of the orisha and the destruction of these gods, Ashâke is stunned because she has devoted her whole life to the temple and beliefs based on the existence of the orisha. She cannot grasp the idea that a malevolent force centuries ago had destroyed them in their sacred home. So, while the griots give Ashâke a warm home and family, they take away the basis of her beliefs.
It’s at that point in the story that I started to have problems, as several key revelations come crowding upon Ashâke in too brief a space. The middle section of the novella seemed to me to need more development to give the main character time to react and absorb a series of shocks. But they come thick and fast and turn her world upside down more than once. Ashâke, for me, in that section seems so gullible and so desperate for mothering that I started to lose interest in her as a character. But fortunately, once the dust settles again, the last part of the story is well told and perfectly paced to take us up to an excellent point of departure for the second novella in this series.
In the Shadow of the Fall has so much going for it that I could get beyond that crowded and rushed middle section. The descriptions of Ashâke’s world make everything tangible and real. The visions of the orisha are stunning, and the final action sequence shows Ashâke coming into her power in a compelling way. I look forward to the second book and hope it arrives soon.
My thanks to Tordotcom and NetGalley for an advance review copy of In the Shadow of the Fall for this review, which reflects solely my own opinions.
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