Review: Birth of a Dynasty by Chinaza Bado

“Revenge…is like poison. It can cancel out other poisons but will still bring you pain.”

Chapter 25: Khalil: Madada

Why Birth of a Dynasty?

I first heard about Birth of a Dynasty from Tori Morrow many months ago in one of her videos. It then reappeared on her best books of 2025 video at which point I was more interested in the book. And then, the book was on a deep discount on the Kobo ebook store at which point I bought it and put it in my to-be-read pile.

This will be the second book I read that came strongly recommended by Tori Morrow and the fourth book in my mini reading challenge for Black History Month. The other books I’ve read in this challenge so far – Lost Ark Dreaming, A Song of Legends Lost, and Dawn. I have one more book in my to-be-read pile that I am planning on reading as part of this challenge with a bonus if I have time leftover this month.

This is my first time reading anything by Chinaza Bado and as far as I can tell this was her debut novel.

Let’s get into it.

The Book

Birth of a Dynasty is the first in an epic fantasy trilogy and like with other epic fantasy novels it open with a map of Ahkebulin; drawn by a Alan Dingman according to the credit on the page. The story is separated by perspective and time, the first section of the book takes place in 453 AAC (After Aksum’s Conquest) and the rest takes places three years later in 456 AAC. I’ll quote from the prologue below to provide some context as to what this means.

The story begins in Ahkebulin, the greatest of the three lands set in the middle of this world. It was once divided by nine warring kingdoms until Aksum Zenzele conquered and unified them all, establishing the Zenzele dynasty. The other eight fallen kingdoms were turned into high noble houses, and for four hundred and fifty-three years, the high nobles their swore their fealty.. ​ ​Until a cold summer night, when the Zenzele betrayed one of them.

Prologue

As for perspectives, that brings us to one of the problems with this book. Like with A Song of Legends Lost, there are quite a number of perspectives. In the 453 AAC section, there are five distinct perspectives, in 456 there are four more added to the pile. The two primary perspectives that make up the bulk of the story are those of M’kuru/Khalil and of Zikora. The rest don’t get as much time and page count and are there to flesh out the world and move the story forward for our two protagonists.

This is a story about vengeance, that much is made clear from the cover itself and the primary motivation for both our protagonists revolve around getting vengeance for a wrong that was done to their respective families. The beginning of the story involves the inciting incidents that give them their motivations.

To be quite frank here, I found the revenge plots to be rather rote and uninteresting. The feelings I have regarding this story remind me of how I felt about the narrative of Assassin’s Creed Shadows which also revolved around two protagonists whose primary motivator was also vengeance. Just like with that story, I found it hard to get invested in the characters’ desire for vengeance.

Of the two protagonists here, I definitely liked Zikora a lot more. She is a headstrong, quirky child who I don’t think got enough time in this book. M’kuru/Khalil seems to be more of a one-note character obsessed with vengeance and vast chunks of the book were from his distinctly uninteresting perspective. If you’ve read my book reviews before you know I’m not a huge fan of reading from the perspective of teenagers and that applies here too, just less so with Zikora.

That brings me to the second problem with this book which is bad pacing. Storygraph has this book tagged as “slow-paced” which I don’t think is quite accurate, “poorly-paced” is more like it. The book moves fast in the first quarter and then slows down in the middle, and then moves at a breakneck speed in the last quarter of the book. The pacing felt uneven and it meant that there were portions of the book that felt like a slog to get through.

The last quarter of Birth of a Dynasty is where it gets good. This is very much a epic fantasy that is much more concerned with political intrigue with fantasy elements as the backdrop. There is no real magic system to speak of and the fantastical elements themselves are quite light. The court intrigue in the last quarter was deliciously cutthroat and I would have liked the book a lot more if that was the majority of the book.

While reading Birth of a Dynasty I also noticed what appeared to be two editing errors where a key word in a sentence was missing. I found two distinct instances of this happening, the second of which I annotated so I can comment on it in this review.

“Surely you know it better than anyone that I must live to become queen dowager and live the rest of my peacefully[..]”

Chapter 29 – Princess Bahiya: Ahalon

The word “life” got dropped from near the end of that sentence. I don’t think the two errors like these were enough to detract from my experience but they were glaringly obvious. I don’t know if this is an issue isolated to the ebook edition of the book or if it is in the print copies as well. This is my first time making note of an editing issue like this in a book review and I hope it is not the start of a trend in the books I read.

Concluding Thoughts

Birth of a Dynasty was another miss for me. The best element of the book, the political intrigue was vastly overshadowed by all the negative elements – too many character perspectives, an uninteresting protagonist, and bad pacing. There is definitely potential in this series and I think if Chinaza Bado can clean those issues up the rest of the trilogy could be something really good.

Unfortunately, I am unlikely to be there to see the glow up if it happens as I am not planning on continuing with this trilogy at this time.

That is all from me. See y’all in the next one.

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