Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Children of Virtue and Vengeance, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power and Systems of Oppression
Cycles of Violence
Tradition and History
Love vs. Duty
Summary
Analysis
Inan’s eyes fly open. He thinks of Zélie’s hatred and thinks that he betrayed Zélie and Amari to kill magic, but he failed: magic is still alive. He remembers how Saran stabbed him and Amari took over the fight. Inan didn’t expect to live. An earsplitting siren goes off. Inan struggles to get up, falls, and realizes he’s in Saran’s old quarters. He stumbles into the wall as Nehanda and soldiers race into the room looking for him. Guards lift Nehanda and Inan to carry them to the cellars, but when they reach the ground floor, Inan sees that it’s just rubble. He escapes the guards and thinks that the last time the palace looked like this, Burners killed Saran’s family and Saran went on to conduct the Raid.
Everything that Inan finds and knows once he wakes shows him that he’s in an endless cycle of violence: he’s in his father’s room, for one, and his home looks like it did over a decade ago when Orïsha was gripped by unspeakable violence. That Inan remembers that Amari killed Saran suggests that Amari and Inan’s relationship, which was once warm, may have also changed because of this violence.
Themes
Inan reaches a window and sees that Lagos is gone. Corpses line the streets amid rubble from blasted buildings. Disbelievingly, Inan watches a sphere of fire rise in the distance and then break apart and explode on the ground. Someone pushes Inan down and when Inan sees the burn scars, he realizes it’s his cousin Ojore. Ojore tells Inan that the Iyika are attacking—they’re at war.
Having Ojore around after implied years of absence gives Inan someone else close to him to lean on. However, Ojore is a soldier, and so has been trained to value doing his job over everything else. Inan, on the other hand, wants to figure out how to combine both duty and love.
Themes
