Black Leopard, Red Wolf Dark Star Trilogy Book 1

3.5*. James is a virtually unparalleled writer, but I would really love to see what he can do in, say, under 400 pages.

can you believe quarantine has lasted so long that my book club has read three whole books together! i’m so glad this was our last pick, because it was so unlike anything i’ve read before. i loved trackers raw angry and sardonic voice, his ability to analyze anyone but himself, and the utter contempt the book has for wealth and royalty and prophecy.

Wow this book was so fucking good - absolutely deserving of the National Book Award nomination. I took my time reading this and I’m so glad it did. It’s so rich in myth and I found Tracker to be an extremely likable character. Beautifully written, the quest fantasy was full of found family, betrayal, heartbreak, and what it meant to do the right thing and even if there was a right thing. My only qualm was that it was a bit hard to get into and took me about 150 pages before I really was invested, but once I was, it was amazing.

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2.5 stars. Way too long and weird for me. I really seem to have problems with animal/human characters in these type of stories.

I tried picking up and starting this book twice and each time I tried, I just had no desire to continue reading it. To be clear, I made it 18 pages the first time and 25 pages the second time and I just wanted to throw it across the room every time the author compared something completely unnecessarily to a sexual organ or sexualized body part. The final straw for me is that on page 25, there’s a scene with a man fondling a boy from the village and it’s totally normal. Even without the sexualization of things, the base writing isn’t good enough to make me want to keep reading on to see if it gets better. This is a hard no from me. Friends, I cannot in good conscience recommend this book to you.

This intense, challenging novel wields uncompromising formal invention to tell a total ripper of an action-fantasy story, breaking new ground in an increasingly stale genre with a truly astonishing display of craft and creativity. Set in a secondary world modeled on pre-colonial African cultures and mythologies, Black Leopard, Red Wolf takes the form of a tale told by its protagonist, the wayward Tracker, to his most recent captors. After detailing his origins, he launches into the main story—the ill-fated search for a kidnapped child.

On its face, Black Leopard is absolutely an epic fantasy adventure—with all the battles, magic, and political intrigue that entails—but, coming from such a resolutely non-Western background and mythic structure, it feels utterly different in the best way possible. Beautiful and brutal, tender and horrific, grounded and psychedelic, this is a work of intense extremes—James’ complex language and tagless dialogue opening the door to elegant, violent action sequences and multifaceted queer eroticism.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a fascinating addition to a lineage of difficult literary genre fiction, in a league with seminal forebears like Morrison’s Beloved, Delany’s Dhalgren, and Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer without being indebted to them. A hard, wild, deeply rewarding ride

What the actual fuck did i just read.

I think I am in a dnfing streak Reading this book is turning my brain into mush

DNF AT 400 I might come back but I feel like this book was just trying to be gross and shocking without purpose. Also I would have appreciated it if women weren’t relegated to rape and abuse victims in men’s stories. Like that’s literally it. There’s 2 female characters that are actually kind of characters and one of them isn’t even named

An epic fantasy tale rooted in African mythology and folklore that moves through a multitude of vibrantly-imagined hostile environments. Extremely violent, sexual, and crass, almost to a fault. I genuinely enjoyed the story on the whole, though it often felt like the author was cosplaying as an edgelord, adding in overtly offensive elements purely for the shock value.

Different fantasy than anything I've ever read. Fascinating, but difficult

This book is absolutely 100% a shroom-fuelled fever dream and I was consistently not high enough to truly appreciate it... I think. It is definitely unique, but part 1 goes on for far too long before you get to any semblance of meat of the plot. Also, women seem to have been unilaterally featured as villains in this book? Warnings for mentions of rape & pedophilia.

Too violent for me

Read for the Winter 2019 Magical Readathon. Week 1 Prompt - Grab your most recently acquired read!

I really didn’t feel this book which was a disappointing reaction because I’d been looking forward to reading it for a long time

This was definitely a book. The writing is good, but not so sure about the story. I think I love speculative fiction because all the energy goes into it being good and that means sometimes it's important. Literary works tend to put so their work into being important and that means sometimes they get to be good. This felt a little too literary for me.

DNF at 20% Wow. This was my most anticipated book of 2019 and I hated it. It's not my writing style and throughout I'm confused AF. I don't mind reading about explicit content, but this was just too much cunt and dick even for my tastes (I love TGOT and I'm currently reading The Barrow). I simply cannot see the "literary genius" of this book. Sorry. I'm so incredibly disappointed.

Blog | Twitter | Instagram (3.5) Review also found here at Booked J. As always, a copy of this book was provided by the publisher or author in exchange for my honest review. This does not effect my opinion in any way. Black Leopard, Red Wolf was such a commitment for me. In a good way. It is an epic fantasy to its very core (which sometimes was a challenge for me, personally, but not painfully so!) and is detailed beautifully. Further, the worldbuilding is highly engaging and descriptive. As such, you can tell that James put forth a great deal of effort in portraying this world and it shows. Between the folklore, setting, use of fantasy and diversity, it is easy to see why readers have been quick to sink their teeth in the story. Black Leopard, Red Wolf has been praised for many good reasons. In that regard, though, it won't be for everyone. If you aren't able to focus on fantasy that has a tendency to be a bit overindulgent and long, you should avoid it. Unless you are absolutely keen on picking it up. One of the only complaints I've got towards it is its pacing and how some points in the story felt like that they dragged on unnecessarily, but I'm still beyond thrilled to have read it. At its best, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is beautifully engaging and a blast. Marlon James starts off a very promising series that will surely get better with time. I'm ready for the sequel.

Marlon James' lyrical, and it must be said, brutal and sexy prose stunned me, sometimes frustrated me, but almost always beguiled me. I can't think of a more challenging and satisfying stylist working in the genre. So many beautiful fantasy books start off promising and then the demands of narrative closure constrain the experimentation. Offhand I'm thinking of Seraphina but there are many examples. Not so with BLRW, which draws its magical runes in the air in front of us right up until the very end, even further whomping us over the head with a change in storytelling tactics just before it looks like we'll be told everything. Not surprising, since one of the subjects of this book's inquiries is storytelling itself. The book's not perfect — I could have done with less bloody battles. But Tracker is an indelible character if not one easily understood or accepted. He's no role model, that's for sure. But I'm following him as long as James lets me. Like Tracker, I love the Ogo, too.