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It has been called the biggest fantasy debut novel of 2018, drawing comparisons with everything from _Game of Thrones_ to _Black Panther_, and has netted a movie deal reported to be worth

seven figures. But Tomi Adeyemi, the 24-year-old Nigerian-American author of _Children of Blood and Bone_, says that such success was the last thing on her mind when she sat down to write

her epic tale of an oppressive world where magic has been outlawed. "For the past 10 months I've spent a lot of time thinking, is this for real?" she says. "I had a lot

of different reasons for writing the book but at its core was the desire to write for black teenage girls growing up reading books they were absent from. That was my experience as a child.

_Children of Blood and Bone_ is a chance to address that. To say you are seen." Adeyemi is the middle child of three – her brother is a musician and her younger sister still at college.

Her father is a doctor, while her mother runs a group of hospices outside Chicago. She studied English literature at Harvard before heading to Brazil on a fellowship to study west African

culture and mythology. It was in South America that the seeds of _Children of Blood and Bone_, the first in a trilogy, were sown. "I was in a gift shop there and the African gods and

goddesses were depicted in such a beautiful and sacred way … it really made me think about all the beautiful images we never see featuring black people." She describes the story – which

follows fisherman's daughter Zélie and an unlikely band of allies and enemies on a quest to reawaken magic in the country of Orïsha – as "an allegory for the modern black

experience". It draws inspiration from both west African mythology and the Black Lives Matter movement. "Every moment of violence in the book is based on real footage," she

says, explaining that an early scene in which Zélie is attacked by a guard was inspired by the notorious video of a police officer pushing a teenage girl to the ground at a pool party in

Texas. "It's not my intention to be gratuitous but I want people to be aware that these things are happening and that the actual videos are much worse." Adeyemi is not the

only young author using fantasy to meld personal stories with political themes. Justina Ireland's hugely anticipated _Dread Nation_, an alternative US civil war story with added

zombies, is published in the US next month. Dhonielle Clayton's _The Belles_, a dark story of beauty, obsession and magic, came out in the UK in February. Meanwhile, the conclusion to

Daniel José Older's acclaimed _Shadowshaper_ trilogy, which follows a diverse group of Brooklyn teens as they fight dark forces, both magical and human, is expected next year. "In

my perfect world, we'd have one black girl fantasy book every month," says Adeyemi. "We need them, and we need fantasy stories about black boys as well." Does she feel

that _Children of Blood and Bone_ is a necessary corrective, given how white much current fantasy is? "Oh yes," she says with a laugh. "That does make my blood boil – the idea

that it's totally fine to have a queen of the dragons but you can't possibly have a black person. "That's why the success of [the recent Marvel movie] _Black Panther

_has been so significant – black and marginalised audiences have the chance to see themselves as heroes depicted in a beautiful and empowering way, and white audiences get to see new stories

told, and it becomes easier for them to picture a black superhero. Imagination is a funny thing – we sometimes need to see something before we can truly picture it." She is clear that

the film version of _Children of Blood and Bone_, which has been chosen as a Waterstones book of the month for March, must have a black director: "It's a deeply, deeply personal

thing – there are parts of the book that black people get instantly because they've lived it." But, she warns, it's important that people don't use young adult fiction as

a quick-fix cure-all. "We can't Obama this, where we have a black president, so suddenly racism is cured, and then eight years later Nazis are marching and people start saying,

'Maybe we have a race problem'," she says. "Our books aren't there to magically fix publishing but maybe they'll start the changes moving so that in six months

we'll have even more great stories, where we see ourselves and are heard." _Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi is published by Macmillan Children's Books, £7.99_