Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Diné Monsters, Holy Ones, Clan Powers, and Romance No! Please--not ANOTHER first-person present tense laconic super special young female narrator heroic adventure story! If writers these days would write in the past tense and or third person, I could handle almost everything else, but… The Hunger Games (2008), Divergent (2011), Dread Nation (2018), The Map of Salt and Stars (2018)… That was my first reaction to starting Trail of Lightning (2018) by Rebecca Roanhorse. Especially when she starts her story in the midst of a full-on action scene: “The monster has been here. I can smell him.” Two things enabled me to persevere: the monster-slaying heroine Maggie Hoskie is Diné (Navajo), and the writing is mostly tight and fast-paced and often gut-punching or chortle-inducing. The Diné angle enables Roanhorse to insert interesting historical, cultural, supernatural, and linguistic details, like the following: Maggie loading her shotgun with “shells full of corn pollen and obsidian shot, both sacred to the Diné”; her K’aahanaanii Living Arrow Clan and Honaghaahnii Walks Around Clan powers from her parents heightening her strength and senses and speed and temporarily turning her into a superhuman killer in moments of need; her calling white people bilagaanas; her showering with yucca soap and rationed water brought by truck; her living near Narbona Pass, named for a Diné chief who was killed by the US army in 1847 while trying to sign a peace treaty; her references to things like the Long Walk, when the Diné were force marched away from their homes in 1864; and her former mentor/lover Neizghani being an immortal, the Monsterslayer of legend, the lightning sword bearing son of two Holy People, Changing Woman and the Sun. With the help of hataalii (Holy Ones), who have stepped out of dreams, legends, and songs, Maggie’s people managed to quickly construct four giant magical, sacred walls (east white shell, south turquoise, west abalone, north obsidian), which have protected them from the chaos of the outside world: the Big Water flooding that killed two billion people worldwide, submerged the entire Midwest, made a new coastline from San Antonio to Sioux Falls, and ended the USA; ensuing energy wars and race wars; oil companies, Feds, prospectors, and multinational corporation armies all doing their greedy things. Unfortunately, it also means that the Diné of Dinétah are locked in behind their walls with a variety of monsters. The novel begins with Maggie tracking a new kind of monster (a tse naayee made of flesh, wood or stone, and a sacred artifact) who’s taken a twelve-year-old girl from her house and carried her up a mountain. The suspenseful sequence introduces us to Maggie’s world and to her abilities (knives and guns, temporary turbocharging clan super powers and senses, etc.), her personality (tough, solitary, anti-social, trauma-scarred, evil-tainted), her monster hunting career (paid in trade items and feared and ostracized for her best efforts), and her 1972 Chevy 4x4 cherry red truck (running on whisky--talk about hardboiled!). Wanting to find out about that monster leads her to consult with her surrogate grandfather Tah, a saintly medicine man monster expert, which in turns leads to Tah foisting his Big Medicine, healer/weather worker, sweet-talking, too-handsome and natty grandson Kai on an unwilling Maggie. The odd-couple partners (she’s taller than Kai and rougher and tougher and more laconic, and while she can become a “living arrow” superhuman killer, he’s a man of peace super healer) go on the road to track down the witch who’s making the appalling new monsters. But, yikes, another special mortal young lady with an uber-cool immortal love interest complicated by the introduction of a handsome and clan-power endowed “Big Magic” healer and weather worker with “preternatural charisma”!? Holy Diné YA Love Triangle?! The novel is very much in the vein of mutant-monster-hero triad stories like X-men, where we’re pretty sure the super-powered protagonist is a hero despite other people and maybe she herself suspecting her of being a monster. Roanhorse also writes the short sentences and short cliff-hanger chapters de rigueur for YA fiction today. And she also writes some corny overly hardboiled lines, like “Trauma, scars, that’s what I’m good at,” and “But I’m no hero. I’m more of a last resort, a scorched-earth policy. I’m the person you hire when the heroes have already come home in body bags.” Is there enough Diné matter to make up for the otherwise typical monster hunting/slaying matter (and the first-person present tense narration)? For that matter, according to Wikipedia, the novel has been criticized “for misrepresenting Navajo teachings and spirituality.” No expert, I have no idea how accurate the novel is in its cultural background. To my mind, it presents a mostly positive female Native American heroine in Maggie and does make Diné culture seem cool. But I don’t care for what Roanhorse does with the Holy People of the Diné, like the trickster god Coyote, the immortal hero Neizghani, or a cat goddess (?) called Mose: they are all extremely unappealing and pettily human in their supposedly immortally derived separation from humanity (what they call “the five fingers”). Though there is plenty of graphic violence with fists, knees, guns, knives, flamethrowers, and supernatural weapons like lightning blades, there is no sex. Audiobook reader Tanis Parenteau is capable, but I didn’t care for her Holy People voices or manners (that may be down to Roanhorse’s writing of those characters, though). People who like Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation or who are interested in a Native American hardboiled yet sensitive female protagonist driving around kicking monster ass would probably like the book. Will I go on and read the sequel? Hmm... View all my reviews
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