Black Leopard, Red Wolf

19 February 2026
#book review,
#100DaysToOffload

Summary

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a novel written by Marlon James. It is a dark fantasy telling the story of "Tracker" in his quest to find a missing child. While what I just wrote is accurate, it's also simplistic and incomplete. This book is much more. It's a violent, beautiful, and evocative journey through a fictional Africa-like continent. The magic and mystery is deeply rooted in African folklore and myths. While reading, I consistently encountered words, people, monsters, and concepts that I was unfamiliar with, and had to research. You can see the fruits of that in the [[#Glossary]] below.

Reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf requires patience and focus. The narrative is not in chronological order, and is a "story within a story". We open on the main character, "Tracker", being interrogated by captors. Tracker recounts his early life, his abilities, and how he got to this point. As they say in the story, Tracker was "born with a nose". Where once he catches a scent, he can follow them anywhere in the world, as long as they're living. Tracker is a fascinating character. He is on a constant quest to figure out who he is, and what he's about. He escapes his abusive family, but struggles to identify who he is outside of that. His culture has many rites of manhood, that he misses due to the lack of a father. This haunts him the rest of his life.

Marlon James abandons traditional conventions of writing dialogue, and there are times where it's tough to track who is saying what. It feels almost like a stream on consciousness. The book is steeped in queerness, with many gay characters. It was a refreshing change from many European based fantasy series, where being gay/queer is seen as taboo. Along with that, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is quite violent. Not just physical violence, but sexual violence as well.

I really enjoyed this book. It taught me about new ideas and cultures. It was beautiful and horrifying.

3-Point Scale

I give this book 3/3 on the 3-point scale. I'm glad I read it, and I think others should too. It's quite different from other books I've read, and a challenge. But a worthy one.