There was danger around every corner, gruesome creatures to haunt your dreams and I really rooted for everyone to make it out alive at the various crossroads they faced. Once I, the reader, entered the jungle with the characters, it was just so thrilling. I much preferred reaching the halfway point and the faster pacing that came with it.

The set up takes a while, but is entirely necessary to really make the characters come to life and give us the full spectrum of their motivations, however, it makes for a slow start. Still, I wasn’t entirely sure it was necessary to include and more than once felt taken out of the story because of it. It often seemed contradictory to what we learned from the others, but at the same time, I have to admit that it made sense in the end. However, the third POV was the one that felt out of place to me for the most part. It was easy to take a liking to sweet Ekon, who is better with books and has a compulsion for counting in order to quell his anxiety, as well as Koffi, who is bold, impulsive and very caring. Told from multiple POVs, namely those of Ekon, a boy who wants nothing more than to follow into his father’s and brother’s footsteps as a warrior, Koffi, an indentured beastkeeper at the Night Zoo, who wants to see her family free, and a third person, who I’d like to keep nameless in this review, it was interesting to see these different characters introduced and oppose each other. From the get go, it is clear that there was a lot of thought put into the magic system and I loved uncovering the different layers to it, despite being quite confused in the beginning. *I was provided with an eARC by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review!*ĬW: death, verbal/physical abuse, indentured servitude/slavery, kidnapping, drug use, sexism, spiders, snakesīeasts of Prey is the debut novel and first installment in a magical Pan-African-inspired series by Ayana Gray.

Beasts of prey ayana