Black Leopard, Red Wolf

by Marlon James

paperback, 640 pages

Published Feb. 4, 2020 by Riverhead Books.

ISBN:: 978-0-7352-2018-8

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard. As Tracker follows the boy's scent--from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers--he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying? Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.

8 editions

mira🦇 reviewed Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Sad, angry, and violent, yet glimmers

4 stars

Content warning major themes and spoiler-ish hero description

Sad, angry, and violent, and yet shows something beautiful. Great world-building with amazing magical elements, monsters, spells, and all. Narration requires attention to piece the story together, and is good.

Interactions between the main hero and narrator, and the rest of heroes of the story, are the highlight. The hero can be described as a gay man hunter/scout/warrior, wandering through life, looking for love and family, and in response to the violence he encounters and which is his occupation and perceived injustice and horrors of his world, setting on revenge. He has great skills, and is painted as of good heart, connecting to the weird and weak, but ends up using his skills mostly for hurting others; he struggles to form intimate relationships, and every time that seems to succeed he's either betrayed or his violent past catches up to him. He also has complicated relationship with women, whom he both find worth hating and protecting.

Overall, I find the story together with the world quite captivating, even if it's another romanticization of a journey of a never-growing-up Don Quixote-ish misfit.

dersoi@bw.diaspodon.fr reviewed Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Hard to stick with it, but worth it

4 stars

I think it took me about 350 pages before finally getting sucked into the story. But when I finally got into to it, I finally found all the details fascinating. The story gets moving, full of action, stories, unique fiction, persona and lore. This is definitely something that should be read by all that love fantasy.

outofrange reviewed Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Wild ass afro-fantasy

4 stars

I usually drop fiction that hits me with too much magic up front, but this was so foreign, irreverent, and unpredictable that it kept me curious. Having finished it I really feel like I've spent time in an alien world. I'm not sure I like or understand all of it, but the exposure forced my mind to broaden somehow.