SON OF THE MORNING

An esteemed author tries romantasy.

All the Kincaid women are powerful, but even these exceptional women regard Galilee with awe and, sometimes, resentment. It’s only after venturing out into the world beyond her hometown of Salvation that Gali begins to discover who she is, and it’s only after a brief, mind-blowing sexual encounter with Lucifer—yes, the devil—that she gets a sense of what she is. Nigerian author and visual artist Emezi has an eclectic bibliography. They’ve written award-winning, critically acclaimed novels for adults and young adults that range from realism to speculative fiction. Emezi has flirted with romance tropes before—notably in Little Rot (2024) and You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty (2022)—but this is quite straightforwardly a romance novel. How readers react will largely depend on how and why they pick up this book. Fans of The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) will appreciate that the author’s voice is as vibrantly lyrical as ever. Fans of paranormal romance will be pleased that they have embedded a forbidden romance within a high-stakes conflict, and the sex scenes are undeniably hot. The author’s deft way with queer characters and queer relationships should please both audiences. The plotting, though, doesn’t quite work for romance, both because the timeline is too short and the pacing is too slow. The main action takes place over the course of a couple of days, during which time Gali and Lucifer experience what romance fans call—generally derisively—“insta-lust” and “insta-love”; Emezi asks readers to invest a lot in leads who are basically archetypes. This might also prove to be an obstacle to those who are new to this genre.

The right readers will love this book, but those readers might be in the minority.