If you like: period pieces, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies."
I would follow the main character of Dread Nation, Jane McKeene, anywhere.
Jane possesses the kind of theatric cunning that can talk the shirt off your back, and if that doesn’t work, she has the resilience and strength to wrestle it off you. It comes in handy, because Jane is a black girl living in a post-Civil War setting, and when she’s not fighting institutionalized racism and sexism, she’s fighting zombies.
There’s a lot of heart-pounding slashing and shooting in Dread Nation, but what gives the story weight is the perspective that Jane provides during that era of American history. Even with all of the battling, with Jane’s sharp edges and the way she has to harden herself, I love that she still has her soft spots. At the root of everything, Jane cares about people, and she will do whatever it takes to protect the deserving.
And the deserving side-characters are full of life and intrigue. Jane has run-ins with a wiley ex, meets a boy so soft and intelligent he makes her heart do embarrassing things, and lives under the same roof as a kind woman who runs a whorehouse in “utopia.”
My favorite relationship that Jane has is with Katherine, another girl stolen away from Miss Preston’s School of Combat for Negro Girls. Katherine is seemingly everything Jane is not—perfectly pretty, white-passing, refined, materialistic—and I really enjoyed watching them clash their way into friendship.
Dread Nation is hard to sum up. It’s layered with culture and history and mystery. While the main focus is on Jane and other black people during that time, Ireland also creates a space to explore other disadvantaged groups: Native Americans, people who have disabilities, and people who live in poverty.
Because yeah, there are zombies, but there are more evil things out in the world: “See, the problem in this world ain’t sinners, or even the dead. It is men who will step on anyone who stands in the way of their pursuit of power.”
For all of my trying to elucidate just why Dread Nation is as important as it is entertaining, Justina Ireland does it much better in her Dear Reader before the prologue:
“Dread Nation is a book…about who gets to lay claim to their humanity and who is seen as little more than a tool that is used to achieve the goal of others. It’s about loving a place that doesn’t love you back, no mater how much you might be willing to bleed and die for it. It’s about understanding that, maybe, the things we’re told and the things other people believe aren’t enough to keep us safe. And that, for some of us, an equal chance was never even an option.
But Dread Nation is still about all the things I love: girls questioning the world and, when those queries lack ready answers, 1-2-3-SLASHing at it with all their might. It’s about friendship forged under duress. It’s about defying expectations and changing our own beliefs about others.”
And zombies. Lots of zombies.
"Dread Nation" by Justina Ireland; Harper Collins Publishers; April 2018.
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