The day after the book was released, Makeready announced it had optioned The Gilded Ones for a film trilogy, with Forna as its scriptwriter and Lovecraft Country showrunner Misha Green as a producer. In selecting the latter, she ventures to the capital city to spar on behalf of the emperor. When Deka inadvertently reveals herself as some kind of monster-her blood runs gold rather than red-she’s forced to choose between surviving as an outcast or as a warrior. Published February 9 in the U.S., the young-adult novel follows 16-year-old Deka, whose patriarchal society of Otera demands girls participate in a bleeding ceremony before they can rightfully join the community. “I dropped to the floor crying,” Forna tells me now. She called her agent back, and heard that Delacorte Press would be purchasing her book for a “significant six-figure” sum. So when the call came that March morning in 2019, she was too busy making herself breathe, meditate, and anticipate rejection, that she missed it entirely. Over the course of that decade, Forna felt there was little room for someone like her: a female African immigrant who believed it was “almost embarrassing to claim” that, in America, Africa should be viewed with anything like reverence.

But I think that my privilege, as someone who was born and raised in Africa, is I grew up always with that understanding.

“It took a movie for people to be able to see that. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh my gosh, Africa can be this magical place,’” Forna says, recalling the immediate aftermath of 2018’s Black Panther landing in theaters. But this was 2012, years before Black Panther and Children of Blood and Bone pushed Afrofuturist film and literature into a supposedly more 'marketable' limelight.

She’d spent the past decade spinning a piece of her birthplace, Sierra Leone, into a novel, centered around a young girl with brown skin and golden blood who lived in a fantastical version of Forna’s homeland. “You're going to breathe, and you're going to continue. “You've been here before,” was her mantra. On the morning she missed the call, Namina Forna was at home, distracted by her own breathing.

The gilded ones review