Dread Nation by Justina Ireland
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Zombies, 19th-Century MAGA, and an Intrepid Heroine Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation: Rise Up (2018) is a little like The Walking Dead crossed with The Hunger Games by way of Bring the Jubilee. The year is 1880. The Civil war was interrupted when, during the Battle of Gettysburg, the dead woke up and started eating both armies, after which Americans had to adjust to living in a USA inundated by zombies. Except for California, the west is unsettled; the east consists of walled cities; and the south is a patchwork of plantations reminiscent of the former slave system. The Native and Negro Reeducation Act opened schools to train Indians and blacks in combat so they may be employed killing the dead. Even in the north, the best career opportunity for African Americans is to become obedient bodyguard “Attendants” to wealthy whites. Luckily, the dead, called shamblers because the older they get the less coordinated they become, can neither talk nor reason. Or can they? Something must explain their conglomerating in ever larger herds. The political situation involves a cold civil war between pacifist Egalitarians who want all colors to live together in modern unity and racist Survivalists who want to return America to its former glory and to god’s order: white people being served by people of color (MAGA for the 19th century). Our guide into that world is Jane McKeene, an intrepid 17-year-old student in Miss Preston’s School for Combat for Negro Girls outside Baltimore. Jane has self-described “hair like sheep’s wool and skin the color of dirt.” In the attention grabbing first lines of the novel she recounts her birth: “The day I came squealing and squalling into the world was the first time someone tried to kill me. . . It was the midwife that tried to do me in. Truth be told, it wasn’t really her fault. What else is a good Christian woman going to do when a Negro comes flying out from between the legs of the richest white woman in Haller County, Kentucky?” We come to learn, however, that for Jane, “The truth and I are uneasy companions at best,” and one of the best parts of the novel is discovering what is true or false in her background story. The novel puts Jane in increasingly dangerous situations involving her ex-boyfriend Red Jack, her frenemy Katherine Deveraux, shamblers, and a MAGA utopia. Apart from being set in an alternate past instead of the future, the novel is a somewhat typical YA short-chapter first-person present-tense girl’s action dystopia like The Hunger Games and Divergent. Multiple handsome young men for our heroine? Check. Too special to be true heroine? Check. Jane perfectly recalls anything she reads; she’s the smartest person her street-smart ex-beau Red Jack knows; she’s the best close quarters fighter and markswoman at the school; she’s braver than anyone else; she’s the mysterious “angel of the crossroads” who saves people assailed by shamblers in the woods; she has “a great destiny.” Her only flaw is cool: lack of respect for authority and bullies: “Aunt Aggie used to say I was like as not to poke Satan with a stick just for fun.” Girls must eat it all up. But Ireland’s novel has some neat things absent from The Hunger Games et al, especially concerning race. The dedication to the novel reads, “For all the colored girls. I see you.” Jane and Katherine are both mixed-race. The imagining of a society in which slavery is over but not really and in which the Survivalist party is gaining power spotlights racial inequality, white nationalism, and regressive nostalgia in the contemporary USA. The racism in the novel is vile. Although Jane is quite aware of skin color—one of the first things she tells us about people she meets—she lacks prejudice. She is attracted to handsome and intelligent guys regardless of race. No matter how generic parts of the novel are, it is refreshing and cool to read a YA novel in which the main characters are kids of color. Ireland also nods to the LGBTQ community by revealing that Jane once had a romance with an older student at her school. During the novel Jane is mainly attracted to guys, but her friendship with the gorgeous golden-skinned Katherine (who doesn’t want to marry) has the potential to become something more than friendship in future. Another virtue of the novel is the excerpts from letters that close each chapter, Part One featuring Jane writing to her mother and Part Two her mother writing to her. The letters form an ironic or moving counterpoint to whatever’s happening in the story, for to avoid worrying each other Jane and her mother relate falsely cheerful information. The steampunk side of the novel seems forced and underdeveloped. A dash of steampunk fashion, as female attendants wear trousers under Victorian dresses. A dollop of steampunk tech, like the “iron ponies” (coal or steam carriages) that replaced horses in the east after the shamblers ate them, and a young Edison-esque “tinkerer” in a mad scientist lab working on a shambler vaccine and tapping a grotesque Faraday machine for electrical power. Race and zombies overshadow the steampunk. Sometimes Ireland loses her grip on her late 19th-century idiom and writes contemporary vernacular, like, “Hi there, Professor Ghering” and “I’m good, thank you.” But she also often writes in Jane’s era, like, “She is sorely vexed.” And I enjoy Jane’s voice, combining African American idiom with big vocabulary: “What? He’s dead. He ain’t gonna be needing it anymore. Besides, this is a quality bit of haberdashery.” There’s also plenty of humor, as in “Kate? Take off that damn corset. We’re going out to face down a horde, not to a ball.” Or There’s nothing white folks hate more than finding out they accidentally treated a negro like a person.” The reader Bahni Turpin is fine: voicing southern and northern, black and white, male and female, young and old characters fine. Her Jane is spot on. Readers thirsty for alternate history YA fiction with girls of color kicking zombie and MAGA ass should enjoy Dread Nation. View all my reviews
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