“And in that moment,” she says, “the world of Orïsha”—the mythical West African country in her novels—“spread out in my mind like a 3D terrain map. DuBois (Ph.D. 1895), studying The Souls of Black Folk in a Harvard English class. But the way Adeyemi tells it, her writing career was never a sure thing before it suddenly happened. And she sketched out plans for five books; the first in the queue turned out to be Children of Blood and Bone. Unlike her previous books, which were aimed at young adults, she thinks this one might be more for adults.