Rust in the Root by Justina IrelandMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Though it’s not a spin-off of her signature alternate historical horror series Dread Nation, Justina Ireland says in the acknowledgements for this standalone novel that her research for those two books led her to a digitized Library of Congress archive of photos of Black Americans in the Depression era, which helped catalyze her into writing this novel. These photos are featured between chapters, much like Miss Peregrine, though Ireland isn’t picking pictures out for scare factor like Ransom Riggs used to do. The pictures help inform a new alternate history where it’s kinda sorta like the Dust Bowl, except Blights of bad magic have caused widespread displacement of people, especially poor people and Black people already systemically suffering. Unsurprisingly, Ireland makes it a point of emphasizing how much a lot of in universe problems are the result of white people exploiting Black people for centuries. I’ll be honest, though, given that Ireland’s got a documented tendency to ignore issues faced by other races (like that time when she flippantly tweeted how Asians didn’t count as people of color, or the time she accused a Native reader of anti Blackness for critiquing Dread Nation in great detail, all of which are long gone from her constantly auto purging Twitter feed by now), I do feel like she’s more than a bit of a hypocrite. I’ll admit, that made me more than hesitant to read this book, but I did read to the end. I’m sorry to say, though, for all her inventiveness with history, Ireland doesn’t do as well with writing a coherent story this time around, and the characters and their relationships are largely quite forgettable, lacking (except in faint glimmers) the usual snarky sparks Ireland infuses into her protagonists. Oh well, guess this one just wasn’t for me.
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