A rich and interesting start to an epic fantasy story that may not suit all readers.
I don’t normally put cautions or content warnings in my reviews, it's not been my general practice. But I am going to begin there, of all places, in my discussion of Birth of a Dynasty by Chinaza Bado because I think burying it would be a disservice to a reader. Birth of a Dynasty has violence and rather bad things happening to two child protagonists, ranging from death of their families to imprisonment in rather dire circumstances, violence against them directly, deadly violence committed by them, and other threats to their mental and physical well being. If that is your red line, this book may not be for you.
With that out of the way, let’s begin again as I normally would in a piece like this. Birth of a Dynasty: A Novel is an African infused and inspired location, setting and cultural matrix for a secondary fantasy world. There has been a slowly growing crop of epic fantasies with their roots in Africa, ever since I lamented their relative lack 15 or so years ago. Epic fantasies whose kingdoms, cultures, social structures are inspired by a part of world often just seen as the colonized, or the oppressed, or exoticized as a place to visit or hear stories about, rather than a power, a center of their own, worlds where African influenced cultures are the axis mundi of their secondary world. Evan Winter, Nisi Shawl, N. K. Jemisin, Marlon James and a slew of others have been exploring this space. Chiaza Bado is the latest.
Our two primary point of view characters do start as children. Let’s start with M’kuru. M’kuru is the youngest scion of the Mukundi family, a powerful and rich noble family in the kingdom. But his status starts to fall from the moment he comes onto the page. We see a vicious attack on his family and its holdings by representatives and envoys of the king. The author has taken to heart the idea of starting a novel with a “bang” as we are quickly plunged into a conflict. It is a conflict that we do not quite understand all that is going on or why, with young M’kuru in the middle of the storm.
And then his counterpart, Zikora. Like with M’kuru, Zikora is a child and the novel again does a good job of portraying a child protagonist. Like M’kuru, she lives a young and sheltered life, but is a bit of a wild child, and definitely willful. She wants nothing more than to train at arms and become a female warrior, even if she doesn’t quite understand what that means in her culture. We do get to see more of Zikora’s life, unlike M’kuru, before her own inciting incidents change her life forever.
There is a prophecy that the ruling Zenzele dynasty is worried about, that a union of scions of these two houses in particular will bring down their kingdom. In true fashion for such stories, the book opens with the Zenzele making that aforementioned vicious attack to wipe out the Mukundi entirely to prevent this from happening. If there are none left, there can be no union, and the prophecy can be averted. M’kuru, as noted above, manages to survive and escape the massacre, but not without cost, emotionally and otherwise. The problem, and it drives the plot for a good portion of the book, is that the Zenzele know that he survived, and so he lives under a cloud, unable to say who he really is, and alert for the possibility of being found out.
M’kuru finally finds a village and winds up getting shanghaied into a family of an elderly father and his daughter and living as a peasant amongst them. He gets a new identity, as Khalil, the bastard son of the daughter. There is a definite riches to rags feel to this sequence, but the intensification of a rather alarming set of events for a child continues. It’s not just a riches to rags, but a degradation of his existence.
Meanwhile, not doing everything by halves, our primary female protagonist, Zikora, is bundled off to live at the royal palace. This is a two-fold affair -- to keep a potential fulfiller of the prophecy under wraps, and also as a check against her father. Zikora’s father is even more powerful than the Mukundi were, and to do the same to them as they had to the Mukundi will require a little more leverage and preparation, But that is, judging from other points of view we get, entirely the plan of the Zenzele. And so Zikora does go to the palace, as one might go into the lion's den.
The story alternates between these two points of view, although M’kuru/Khalil's point of view gets more play and he is the more active character in some ways. And that is where I think the book misses a trick. With Zikora, inside of the royal palace, we get to see how women, in a rather strongly patriarchal society, can and do wield power and influence and manipulate events as best they can. Queens, concubines, and “guests” like our protagonist all are in a sharp competition for status and influence and these passages were, for me, some of the best in the book. They are a marked difference to M’kuru/Khalil's story and in general, I kept hoping that the story would return to Zikora more frequently than it actually did.
Both M’kuru/Khalil and Zikora grow into their roles as their paths converge toward their first meeting. There is plenty of in-palace plot in the last portion of the book, and while the book does break from our protagonists' points of view to give us information, it is here in this section that those non-protagonist point of views become crucial to the reader to piece together just what is going on.
I was thinking of Forged for Destiny by Andrew Knighton, which I read recently, since that novel deconstructs the whole idea of destiny and fate and a chosen one (or here, what seems to be indicated as the chosen couple). This novel does play it straight and shows how the winds of fate and destiny can be opposed, but never thwarted. I am not as familiar with the underlying cultures that inform and infuse this book. So for me, the Zenzele trying to stop the prophecy that will doom them has a very Greek myth sort of feel. Your child will murder your father and marry your mother, so you expose the baby on the mountainside and thus set the chain of events in motion because your child grew up ignorant of his real family. This novel is in that mold (or at least the portion of the story as far as I can tell).
And so I sit here on the tenterhooks of how I felt about the book overall. It’s well written, and has some rather vivid imagery--but some of that imagery is rather hard to take, especially when it involves children. It’s a rich and interesting world (but again, mind, it's very patriarchal in nature and there is not even a hint of anyone who is queer -- but would children raised in a society like this even know what that is or what it means?). But the genre elements, aside from being in a secondary world, are relatively slight for epic fantasy. There are a few things here and there and there is a setup for Zikora that doesn’t have much payoff in this novel, although it is clearly set for future books. It is mostly a story of prophecy, and politics and the hard road that two children undergo in the stews of both.
As far as the ending, this is the first book in a series and the narrative comes to a stop without any sort of offramp whatsoever. It’s a fraction of a larger book, not a complete story in and of itself. The protagonists have aged into teenage years by the end of the book, and so the threat of violence to children protagonists is unlikely in subsequent volumes. And there is a sense that Bado is trying for a grand sweeping epic that will take years or even longer of the lives of its protagonists to accomplish. I admire the ambition and the drive to try for it. The prophecy is not at risk of being fulfilled in a short while.
There are definitely readers that will enjoy this book and eat it up with a spoon and craving the next book. And I wanted to. But this first volume... did not leave me, alas, wanting more of the epic.
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Highlights:
Reread the content warnings. Seriously.
Classic fulfillment of a prophecy story.
African-themed epic fantasy, immersively so.
Only the start of the story.
Reference: Bado, Chinaza, Birth of a Dynasty: A Novel [Harper Voyager, 2025]
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
