Review: The Black Coats

The Black Coats by Colleen Oakes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: rape, sexual assault and allusions/accusations thereof, racism, death of a loved one.

Picking up this next book from Colleen Oakes in ARC form at work, I expected it to be a rewrite of her Peter Pan-themed fantasy retelling just like Queen of Hearts and sequels were rewrites of a previous self-published project. But no, instead she gives us a pretty high-stakes - and pretty accidentally relevant, since it was written several years ago before #MeToo became so prominent and topical - contemporary thriller.


Well, at the start it doesn't look so contemporary because it begins with a prologue in the 70s, but that's highlighting the catalyzing incident for the eventual start of the Black Coats vigilante group. Their job: justice for women who've been wronged by men, carried out in the form of acts called "Balancings" - usually involving seduction, and then turning the men's own crimes against them. For instance, a guy tries to spike a woman's drink to date-rape her? The Black Coats will roofie him and leave him stripped naked in the middle of a field to properly punish him.

Sound cathartic? I'd think so.

But that's until, of course, the fine line between justice and vengeance gets crossed as it does way too often in this world. One of the major themes of this book, it is - how maybe the answers shouldn't be so easy, so cut and dried...and if you've got a secret society within your secret society doing the wet work, maybe you need to reevaluate your goals and methods both. Or maybe not. Maybe you want that vengeance because that's just how cruel the world's been to you.

Or maybe you're Thea, our main character, in the Black Coats because she's been promised the chance to effect a Balancing that's particularly personal to her, and all the other assignments are stepping stones along the way. Stepping stones to follow while coping with the recent unsolved death of someone she loves and always being on high alert for racism (no less than one woman makes it a point of touching her "cocoa" skin in a most uncomfortable way and calling it such too, and when she, as a Black girl, starts dating a white boy, she fears that others, including the boy's father, will violently disapprove - but no, Thea and Drew's relationship obstacles throughout the book have little to nothing to do with race.)

The blurb promises that this book will appeal to fans of Moxie, and I'd agree on the grounds that both books are feminist and set in Texas. Moxie, though, doesn't get nearly this dark - and hell, I've seen a few complaints since Moxie came out that the book was too simplistic and even white feminist to be as effective as it wanted to be. Oakes, though, takes care that the cast of this book isn't so overwhelmingly white, and delves into the moral shades of gray that also helped define the Queen of Hearts trilogy so well.

Having a real-life Black Coat group - hell, I can almost imagine the result if they cross over with the similarly styled Black Iris organization in Elliot Wake's books, which would add a pretty strong queer angle as well - could solve a lot of problems. As long as there's no extra-vengeful types looking to rot the whole apple bushel...

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