PLATEYE begins in the Kingdom of Dahomey, 1859, where Prince Baako is on the cusp of manhood – having just survived the Rites of Passage and earned his place among warriors. But a deadly betrayal by a Vodun priestess sets in motion a chain of events that will change him forever. When her dark power transfers into Baako at the moment of her death, he begins to feel something shifting beneath his skin – something ancient, something hungry, something that cannot be caged.
This is not a story about a monster.
$13.99
He was a prince of Dahomey.
The Middle Passage made him a beast.
Love – impossible, forbidden, eternal – made him human again.
But some transformations cannot be undone.
PLATEYE begins in the Kingdom of Dahomey, 1859, where Prince Baako is on the cusp of manhood – having just survived the Rites of Passage and earned his place among warriors. But a deadly betrayal by a Vodun priestess sets in motion a chain of events that will change him forever. When her dark power transfers into Baako at the moment of her death, he begins to feel something shifting beneath his skin – something ancient, something hungry, something that cannot be caged.
Captured by slavers and thrown into the hold of a cursed ship called the Resurrection, Baako endures the horrors of the Middle Passage as his transformation accelerates. By the time the ship runs aground on American soil, he is no longer fully human – and not yet fully beast. He is something in between. Something that the men who call themselves masters are utterly unprepared for.
On the Robinson Plantation, chained and stripped of his royal identity, Baako discovers two things that will anchor his century-spanning journey: the courage of enslaved people who refuse to stop fighting, and Vashti – a young woman whose quiet strength and impossible love become the only force powerful enough to hold his humanity together.
What follows is a story that spans from the dust of Dahomey to the blood-soaked soil of the American South to the present day – an immortal shapeshifter’s reckoning with who he was, what he became, and whether love can survive across 170 years of loss.
Fans of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the African mythology of Nnedi Ofofor, and the dark historical sweep of Toni Morrison’s Beloved will find in Plateye a story that is at once an African historical fantasy, a supernatural slave narrative, and a timeless love story.
This is not a story about a monster.
It is a story about what it takes to remain human when the world spends centuries trying to strip that from you.
PLATEYE: Book One is the opening chapter of an epic that crosses continents, centuries, and the line between man and beast.
Begin the journey today.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.