My first introduction to Tobi Ogundiran’s work was his short story “The Lady of the Yellow-Painted Library,” which appeared in the Africa Risen anthology. In this tale, an unlucky salesman is relentlessly pursued by an otherworldly librarian for failing to return on time a copy of Things Fall Apart. It’s a fiendishly funny tale about karmic justice and repaying debts that also manages to be enormously entertaining. It marked Ogundiran out as a skilled writer with a firm grasp on tightly knitted plots and engaging characterization. Here was an author who could be trusted to take readers on a thrilling adventure, packed with startling yet thematically relevant twists and turns. So it’s rather welcome to note that his debut novella, In the Shadow of the Fall, the first of a planned duology, boasts these same qualities. It offers up a fun and frenetic, page-turning ride, steeped in Yoruba myth and oral tradition.

In the Shadow of the Fall follows the exploits of Ashâke, a young woman serving in the temple of Ifa who constantly chastises herself for failing to summon the gods—until she herself becomes unwittingly embroiled in a cosmic war. Ashâke starts out as a frustrated acolyte who is forced to watch from the sidelines as her peers, including her best friend, all complete their religious instruction and venture out into the world, in service to the orisha, while she remains stuck at the temple. She’s an easily likeable protagonist with whom readers can empathize, despite also rolling their eyes at some of her (bad) decisions. Though she follows her tutors’ lessons to the letter, the gods do not respond to her calls—which Ashâke, of course, sees as a personal failing. This prompts her to defy the rules and attempt a forbidden ritual in the Sacred Grove to call and bind the orisha—a bold and risky effort that nevertheless ends in yet another failure and the death of an ancient tree. She’s repeatedly reprimanded by the elderly priests, until, exasperated, she runs away and joins a welcoming group of nomads. But this temporary idyll is soon ruined, and her newfound community destroyed, in a senseless act of carnage wrought by the arrival of a mysterious shapeshifting god-killer. Shocking secrets of Ashâke’s past as well as the reasons for the orisha’s seemingly silent attitude are revealed in a series of satisfying twists.

Working with the space constraints of the novella form, Ogundiran employs a remarkably simple plot—a straightforward subversion of the Chosen One trope—to do justice to Ashâke’s character arc, while enlivening the story with colorful supporting characters, crisp interludes, and interesting details about this West African-inspired fictional world. Ashâke herself reminded me of Tenar, the main character in Ursula Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan (1971). Like Tenar, Ashâke too is rather lonely and isolated, but rather than wait for someone like Ged to disrupt her usual routine and question the core tenets of her religion, Ashâke rebels much earlier on, trusting instinct over indoctrination. This leads her to make some rather unwise choices, but Ashâke is stubbornly determined to take fate into her own hands, only to realize that there are several unseen forces at play. To keep the reader invested in the narrative, Ogundiran structures his chapters such that each new revelation breathlessly follows the last, building to an action-packed climax that thankfully doesn’t conclude with a cliffhanger. An interesting fallout of this approach is that, by the end, both the reader and Ashâke are in the same boat—confronting facts that have altered their very understanding of the world, and slowly coming to terms with these developments. This renders Ashâke’s relatability and identification with the reader absolute.

Though this novella is the first half of a duology, Ashâke’s literal and metaphysical journey within the narrative ensures that it manages to stand on its own feet—instead of being just a long-winded exposition for the next installment, like a lot of the sequel-baiting franchises that dominate the media landscape of today. Ogundiran’s prose is refreshing, compelling, and vivid—sketching out telling minutiae with painterly detail. I particularly loved the brief flashes of magic, especially the way in which the nomads’ recitation of their stories reanimates the very “memory” of the past, materializing them as an intensely immersive experience for the listener—this neatly emphasizes, in a very literal sense, how oral traditions keep alive history and myth. I also enjoyed the small interactions between Ashâke and the people whom she befriends after running away, such as Djola and Ralia—short scenes that highlight the nervous excitement of new connections while hinting at the simple joys of childhood and community life that she missed out on. In fact, I wished for more such quiet moments to pepper the text.

While the sequel seems to hint at the orisha playing a more dramatic and explicit role in proceedings, Ogundiran’s depiction of the gods seems in line with contemporary representations of godliness and religion in speculative fiction. In fact, stories featuring fickle gods intermingling with mortals seem all the rage now, and this novella reminded me of Wole Talabi’s exhilarating heist novel, Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon (2023), in which the Yoruba pantheon also make an appearance (I’m getting a nice crash course in African mythology right now), and Gabriela Romero Lacruz’s The Sun and the Void (2022), in which deities from Venezuelan myth and folklore use unsuspecting humans as their pawns. Despite cultural differences, these books and earlier works seem to have in common a collective conceptualization of pantheons where belief in a god isn’t necessarily a badge of loyalty but a currency that can be bought, sold, bartered with, or even competed against. The gods, in these renditions, are definitely supernatural creatures—but ones that can be humanized and therefore killed, pointing to an understanding of divinity not as a symbol of omnipotence and omniscience (unlike the Christian conception of a singular “God”) but as polyphonic beings with particular agendas with whom one can negotiate.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with this novella—it is tightly crafted, very enjoyable, not many flaws to complain of. But if I had to nitpick, I would note that the latter half of the text is rather rushed. This may prevent readers from lingering on the story’s themes and the conundrums it tries to explicate, be it the dubious ethics of a schooling system that deliberately feeds lies to its younger students as part of its curriculum (this can be compared to the YA graphic novel Squire by Nadia Shammas and Sara Alfageeh [2022], that also tackles the notion of formal education and history lessons as propaganda tools for the ruling order), or the tragic genocide of a nomadic clan that welcomes outcasts only to be infiltrated by the god-killers. But these developments are merely glossed over, as the book hurriedly moves from one plot point to another. The fast pacing that allows for such cursoriness may not necessarily be a fault in and of itself, but it unconsciously points towards how mainstream genre publishers often heavily favor certain kinds of plot structures (while reducing a story into a set of tropes and themes at the cost of narrative depth and texture), assuming limited attention spans of their targeted readers.

Thus, In the Shadow of the Fall makes for a mostly fun and fast read, filled with intrigue, hidden gods, and inventive magic, yet marked by the familiar trappings of epic fantasy, such as unlikely heroes facing off against evil. Ogundiran masterfully juggles a very fine balancing act throughout—evoking with just a few strokes and in a short span of pages a lived-in fantastical world, populated with disguised gods and disgruntled followers all scheming against each other. This ensures that readers feel satiated yet remain curious about the sequel.