Review: Dread Nation

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I didn't have to wait as long for this latest Justina Ireland book as those who read her first two books pretty quickly when they first came out. Which, from what I'm seeing, weren't that many people - certainly not as many as there would be now that Ireland's given us her most commercially successful book yet, peaking at #5 on the New York Times YA bestseller list, if I remember correctly. And now those many people, myself included, have a while to wait until Ireland gives us the sequel to Dread Nation - a wait which I'll be pretty impatiently hoping to see end ASAP.

Ireland here gives us a very well-realized alternate history, where the turning point was the rise of the undead during the Civil War. After that, the Civil War ended a little sooner than expected, and with, officially, the end of slavery as the South realized they had a little something more worth dealing with than maintaining their old systems. But in the intervening seventeen years before this book takes place, there's risen a new government, a new society, a new America that still hasn't learned to, you know, not be bloody racist. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" and all that. So the new political system in this new shambler-run America consists of the Survivalists - white supremacists who insist that black and Native people should be the ones responsible for keeping all the white people safe in their walled-off cities, and with Nazi-esque colors before the Nazis ever happened too! - and the Egalitarians, who proclaim equality but don't do much to fight for it, especially since they're also self-proclaimed "pacifists" who don't even want to use guns.

Sound familiar?

I'll let you fill in the blanks.

Maybe Ireland's social commentary doesn't quite hit all the marks - Debbie Reese, for one, has outlined in great detail the book's failings re: Native American history and oppression. But for Ireland's real area of expertise - putting white Americans on blast for either anti-blackness or apathy to black freedom - she's in her element like few others.

The real strength of this book, for me, is the lead character of Jane McKeene. #ownvoices in multiple ways, as a bisexual and biracial black girl, she's also an ass-kicking destroyer of the undead, and snarks her way through all 400-plus pages of this book because, well, she is a Justina Ireland creation. Also a favorite character for me is Katherine, aka Kate. Mixed like Jane but very, very, very white-passing, Kate has a rude attitude at first, but she opens up more and more to Jane as the story goes on, and becomes a hell of a lot more sympathetic - reminding me a lot of Lydia from Teen Wolf in that respect. Kate also brings additional queer rep to the table - she's asexual, possibly aromantic as well. (Neither term is used in text, and nor is "bisexual," but that's to be expected given the alternate-historical setting when such terminology was almost certainly nonexistent anyway.)

It's a long, sometimes slow read, but it all builds up to a most interesting cliffhanger indeed. A very tantalizing hint about what lies ahead in Book 2.

Naturally, I'll be ready to read it, as well as Ireland's other new series, The Never and the Now, as soon as we get them.

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