Tomi Adeyemi had worked unsuccessfully on a manuscript for three years before beginning
Children of Blood and Bone. The idea for the novel came after a trip to
Brazil: "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". The spate of police violence against black Americans had a large impact on Adeyemi; she wanted to escape the helplessness and fear she felt: "What is the point if my life ends at the barrel of a police officer's gun?" In the author's note at the end of the novel, Adeyemi makes a call to emotion, telling the reader that "if [they] cried for Zulaikha ... cry for innocent children like
Jordan Edwards,
Tamir Rice, and
Aiyana Stanley-Jones." Adeyemi drew inspiration from
Yoruba culture and Western fantasy fiction like
Harry Potter and
Avatar: The Last Airbender and from both
West African mythology and the
Black Lives Matter movement. She has also cited the books
Shadowshaper and
An Ember in the Ashes as primary inspirations. Finally, Adeyemi was also affected by the
backlash against the black characters in the film
The Hunger Games: she wanted to write a story so good even racists would want to read it. Adeyemi worked as a creative writing coach while she wrote the novel. While her first draft had major sections of the story omitted, the second draft, which she was ultimately forced to complete in a month to enter it in a writing competition, was where she felt it needed to meet her expectations. For Adeyemi there was no option but for the book to be successful and perfect, given the pressures placed on black creators: "I'm not going to put Zélie's face on the cover of this book and give you anything less than an incredible story, because for the kids who have never seen themselves, they need to see that, and they need to know that they are beautiful and that they are powerful". She wrote the book while bingeing the television show
The Good Wife in the background. She became so exhausted through the non-stop work of the writing that she became disoriented, even at one point thinking she was a lawyer. She worked hard to map the distances between cities and the time it would take a horse and lion to travel between them, as well as reasoning through the logical implications of her creative choices, such as having characters ride
big cats. She also had to figure out parallels in her imagined world to issues like
skin bleaching, which would not exist in a world without white people. She got help from her
Nigerian mother at times for things like naming the spells that involved use of the
Yoruba language. ==Publication history==