I finally finished Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (and which was included in one of our Summer Reading Lists!) and oof, I don’t even know if I had words for it yet. The reading experience was very similar to LOTR (lots of walking, lots of lore, fellowship of misfits), but it was also so much grittier and more violent that it felt a lot harder to get through.
That said, it’s a masterpiece, and so different from anything I’ve ever read before. Neil Gaiman’s blurb on the back is pretty spot-on, and he describes it as “A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter’s. It’s something very new that feels old, in the best way.”