Genre: Fantasy
Publication: February 5, 2019
My Rating: 4/5

Goodreads Synopsis:
In the first novel in Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child.

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: “He has a nose,” people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written an adventure that’s also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf explores the fundamentals of truths, the limits of power, the excesses of ambition, and our need to understand them all.

                          My Thoughts

There are few fantasy novels that can do what Marlon James accomplished with this much-anticipated first release of the even more anticipated Dark Star trilogy to come. It’s a story that felt as simultaneously ancient as it was ageless. Black Leopard Red Wolf took me to an otherworldly Africa where unexpected crevices of African mythology and history pressed and pushed and bullied me into uncomfortably intense prose. Following a band of mercenaries, anti-heroes, and shapeshifters, the story unfurls around a quest to reunite a mother and her son. Continue reading *Review* Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James →