The Owls Have Come to Take Us Away by Ronald L. Smith

T’Challa and M’Baku find themselves on opposite sides of a widening gulf. The school bully turns out to be a lot more sinister than he first appears.

Strange things start happening around school. Of course, not everything goes according to plan. So, fairly quickly, we follow T’Challa and his best friend M’Baku to Chicago, where they will attend South Side Middle School posing as exchange students (i.e., NOT royalty). It’s so unsettled, in fact, that his father – the king, T’Chaka – sends him to the United States with the purpose of keeping him safe. The situation in Wakanda is tense – tense enough that even young T’Challa knows something bad is on the horizon. The book takes place when T’Challa is just 12 years old, and only the very beginning is set in Wakanda. The truth is, for The Young Prince, at least, it doesn’t really matter.

With the film coming to digital and Blu-ray in a few weeks, now’s a perfect time to catch up on your Wakandan lore and dig into the early days of T’Challa and Black Panther.įans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe may want to know if these books fit into the canon unfolding on screen of it hey’re more tied to the comic book versions of the characters. Smith’s look back at Black Panther’s tween adventures in The Young Prince. We covered Christopher Golden’s Runaways here, and the lineup also includes Jason Reynolds on Miles Morales, Eoin Colfer on Iron Man, Shannon Hale on Squirrel Girl, and Margaret Stohl on Black Widow. If you haven’t been paying attention, you might have missed that Marvel Press (an imprint of the massive Disney Book Group) has been putting out some truly excellent YA novels (with some spectacular authors) starring the Marvel superheroes. This was when T’Challa felt most alive, in the woods with his best friend, finding adventure and escaping his royal duties.

The Owls Have Come to Take Us Away by Ronald L. Smith