Monday, June 24, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Dread Nation by Justina Ireland




Dread Nation is the most recent Young Adult work from author Justina Ireland (who previously wrote two YA fantasy books I'd read, Vengeance Bound and Promise of Shadows).  I didn't love those other two works (they were both fine, and Vengeance Bound was at least solid, but neither was exceptional), and Dread Nation is a part of a genre I'm not particularly interested in - the Zombie story - so I'd originally planned on skipping Dread Nation, even when it came out to pretty high reviews.  But the book picked up both a Norton Award Nomination (the Nebula for Best YA SF/F novel) and a Lodestar award nomination (the Hugo equivalent), so I reserved it both as an ebook and a physical book from my library.

And well....I feel pretty much about this book how I expected - it's a solid fantasy historical fiction version of the zombie story, telling the story of an alternate US post a civil war interrupted by the emergence of zombies, and non-Whites (Blacks, Native Americans, etc.) are forced to defend the White citizens from the zombie threat.  So even more than the usual zombie tale - which usually use zombies as a plot device to explore social issues - this is a story with strong themes about race and color, about passing and fighting, etc.  And yet....despite the book being solidly done, I just never really got that into it.

Maybe a longer explanation after the jump will help me better nail down these feelings:

---------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Jane McKeene was born mysteriously as a black daughter of the Lady of a Plantation.  But when Shamblers (Zombies) arise in the United States, particularly in the South, resulting in a premature end to the Civil War, Jane finds herself growing up in her teenage years at "Miss Preston's School of Combat for Negro Girls", one of many established schools throughout the US designed to train Black women to fight and kill shamblers, so that white people can be safe.  Jane chafes against the restrictions placed upon her in the school, as well as against some of the other girls, like the lighter skinned Katherine/Kate, but she knows the school is her best chance at earning the most freedom possible for a black girl in the late 1800s, so she is desperate to survive it all.

Yet Jane soon discovers that the world hasn't quite moved on from slavery, and that the Survivalist party that emerged from the racist views of the slaveholders has plans of their own for America that don't portend good things for anyone of Non-White skin.  The discovery results in Jane and her friends sent to a survivalist camp in the Midwest, where one wrong move will result in her death.  But Jane knows she can't simply try to survive day to day in the camp, and decides to take actions into her own hands to find freedom.  But the bigoted leaders of the camp have their own plans for the community, secret plans that could result in not just Jane's death, but the death of everyone...White, or non-White.
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Dread Nation is told entirely from Jane's first person perspective, outside of some letters that are excerpted from at the beginning of each chapter.  And this works quite well, since Jane is a fairly solid character to guide us through this world and explain the differences in how things are from our own history.  Ireland is particularly effective at using Jane's narration to hint at certain reveals down the line without making them totally obvious, which really makes those reveals doubly effective.

And Jane's a fun and solid character, the young woman of color in a world that hates her, who refuses to simply do what she's told when she can help other people with her violent skills, and is unwilling to shut up in the name of bigoted authority figures.  She's very much a character archetype I'm pretty damn familiar with - although usually these types of characters are far more naive than Jane is, which is a nice touch - but she's effectively done.  Jane's fellow young woman, Katherine, the lighter skin girl who could in theory pass for White, is an even more effective character honestly - and while we never get to see directly in her head, her own views toward her people, her own views towards what she should be as a woman, as well as her sexuality.  You'd think she'd be the annoyingly naive character who has to learn better throughout, but she absolutely isn't, and honestly her development is the most interesting of any character in the whole book.

The rest of the characters.....eh.  Love interest (kind of?) Red Jack gets bits and pieces, but we never really get to know him except that we're told Jane has feelings for him from her narration.  I really wish we had more flashbacks to the history before them, but we never get that.  Jane's mother is entirely off page, but probably gets the next most development other than the two main characters and I hope we see her on page in the sequel.  Scientist Gideon gets some promising potential development - probably the most for a White character - and then completely goes AWOL in the final few chapters somehow.  And the villains are pretty typical bigoted bastards in this time period who aren't particularly interesting.

Which is not to say that the plot doesn't have interesting aspects or use its theme of race and color (particularly through Katherine and her issues with passing) in interesting ways.  It absolutely does, with the ways the survivalist leaders both out East in the book's first part or out in the midwest in the second part treat people of color and try to deal with the shambler threat feeling both very real and very disturbing, as intended.  It definitely works, and it definitely lends itself towards a somewhat satisfying ending that also has a decent hook for the book's sequel.  Still, the pacing of this book is perhaps a bit off, with the first part (which takes up 40% of the book) feeling like it takes too long to get things going only to end with the transition to the second part, which is more significant.

Again, Dread Nation is solid and I get why others might like it more than me.  But maybe it was the pacing, maybe it was the lack of development other than the two main characters, but I just found myself never really that interested in continuing with the book whenever I put it down, and had it not been nominated, I might have DNFed it.  It just never caught my attention, so I'm perhaps maybe a bit more negative on it here than I should be.  But it is what it is.

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