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3.97 AVERAGE
3.97 AVERAGE
5/5
The post-apocalyptic world building woven with Indigenous lore and tales was amazing. Even better were the characters!
Maggie our heroine... traumatized and fearful of her own clan powers, but that doesn't stop her from pulling out her shotgun and socking monsters. We love her and her distrustful nature because like you never know who's trying to use you or is out for your blood.
Then there's Kai, the city slicker, really think Roanhorse did amazing with the City boy/Rural girl trope. Like he really was a useless city boy until near the end..... and even then there were things.... but anyways I loved it
I do like how it addressed the unhealthy relationship between mentor and mentee, where the mentor takes advantage of their mentee's devotion and is overall shitty and plays into their insecurities. But also..... what was that ending
The post-apocalyptic world building woven with Indigenous lore and tales was amazing. Even better were the characters!
Maggie our heroine... traumatized and fearful of her own clan powers, but that doesn't stop her from pulling out her shotgun and socking monsters. We love her and her distrustful nature because like you never know who's trying to use you or is out for your blood.
Then there's Kai, the city slicker, really think Roanhorse did amazing with the City boy/Rural girl trope. Like he really was a useless city boy until near the end..... and even then there were things.... but anyways I loved it
I do like how it addressed the unhealthy relationship between mentor and mentee, where the mentor takes advantage of their mentee's devotion and is overall shitty and plays into their insecurities. But also..... what was that ending
I definitely think that there is a tendency for white readers to misconstrue Maggie’s persona. She might be too angsty, too rash, and too naive for them. But Roanhorse’s incorporation of traumatizing personal history (of the character) along with a community’s fraught history into a future free from the trappings of our imperialist society allows for the problems in the book to be wholly different, even remotely supernatural. Which is something authors rarely ever manage to execute without being tone deaf.
Maggie, due to everything she has faced, along with the enormous responsibility on her shoulders (not to mention the HISTORY OF ABANDONMENT) is going to be gruff and unpolished! I also think that a lot of people don’t like it when the female character is grumpy in the grumpy/sunshine trope because, you know, sexism. But I think you have to fight that misogynistic impulse, internalized or otherwise, to dislike Maggie just because she isn’t cheery and hopeful.
She is a Monster Slayer.
But yeah, this book is great!
Maggie, due to everything she has faced, along with the enormous responsibility on her shoulders (not to mention the HISTORY OF ABANDONMENT) is going to be gruff and unpolished! I also think that a lot of people don’t like it when the female character is grumpy in the grumpy/sunshine trope because, you know, sexism. But I think you have to fight that misogynistic impulse, internalized or otherwise, to dislike Maggie just because she isn’t cheery and hopeful.
She is a Monster Slayer.
But yeah, this book is great!
5 stars for characters & setting. 3 stars for OMG I hate reading about fights & viscera.
So much POC and strong female characters. Supernatural, fascinating, a bit of romance. Ohhhh yesss.
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
tense
fast-paced
Ladies and Gentleman, let's all take a moment to appreciate how amazing this book is
Rebecca Roanhorse, you have created something truly dark, gory and fricken awesome! After a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters. In this book we follow Maggie Hoski, a Monster hunter. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last best hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much more terrifying than anything she could imagine.
I really loved the native American elements and the dark and gory nature of the book. 4.5 stars!
Rebecca Roanhorse, you have created something truly dark, gory and fricken awesome! After a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters. In this book we follow Maggie Hoski, a Monster hunter. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last best hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much more terrifying than anything she could imagine.
I really loved the native American elements and the dark and gory nature of the book. 4.5 stars!
This was damn good. I'm always a sucker for "oh, we're stuck together as partners" as a trope, but this world and characters really took it to the next level. I loved Coyote, I loved the world that was built, I am dying to read the next book as it ended on a very good cliffhanger.
I loved this book. It is fun and creepy and action packed and also somehow nostalgic for me. I loved all the little things that are so Rez (snagging, lip pointing). It’s about time we get fun Native American fantasy written by a Native American. I liked that Maggie is a badass and her male partner is the healer/mediator, but her self-esteem issues are a little trope-y and the end was a little anti-climatic for me. I think this is a great debut novel and look forward to the next in the series and to more writing from Roanhorse in general.
I wonder what my clan powers would be with Many Goats and Red House clans...
I wonder what my clan powers would be with Many Goats and Red House clans...
Wasn't especially impressed by this book.
To start with the positives: it's very interesting as a mixture of genres - you might have heard of it as a speculative, native American fantasy novel, but it actually makes more sense as a speculative Western. The main character is a 'lone gunslinger' archetype who collects bounties and fights monsters (read: outlaws/bandits). It's set in the midwest desert, with sparse towns, gangs, taverns, mesas, and so on. Classic western. I read it with the Good, the Bad and the Ugly soundtrack in the background. What's more interesting is that the 'race' roles are reversed - it's the First Nations characters who are the cowboys and sheriffs in this novel, rather than the stereotypical enemies.
Onto the negatives though. For all that the premise offers, the writing in the book lets it down. The dialogue is hackneyed and feels disingenuous. It's meant to be enigmatic back-and-forth repartee, but it lacks wit or charm. The character development arcs are very fast and difficult to believe. Also, the timeline is extremely confusing - the protagonist was a child living with her grandma just four years earlier, but is now a mid-20s hardened killer? How long did she spend in the interim with Neizghani? Sometimes it sounds like one year, sometimes it sounds like fifteen.
Lastly, the final third of the book - building up to the climax - loses the plot a bit. It stops being a Western (which made it interesting) and just becomes a fantasy battle, which is a shame. I wasn't invested in any of the characters, so deaths and battles felt like nothing was at stake. And the twists in the plot were hard to follow, and felt pointless because (again) I wasn't invested in the characters.
All in all, I think the book had a good, imaginative premise and comes from a different literary perspective than most stuff I read. But it fails to live up to the promise, unfortunately.
To start with the positives: it's very interesting as a mixture of genres - you might have heard of it as a speculative, native American fantasy novel, but it actually makes more sense as a speculative Western. The main character is a 'lone gunslinger' archetype who collects bounties and fights monsters (read: outlaws/bandits). It's set in the midwest desert, with sparse towns, gangs, taverns, mesas, and so on. Classic western. I read it with the Good, the Bad and the Ugly soundtrack in the background. What's more interesting is that the 'race' roles are reversed - it's the First Nations characters who are the cowboys and sheriffs in this novel, rather than the stereotypical enemies.
Onto the negatives though. For all that the premise offers, the writing in the book lets it down. The dialogue is hackneyed and feels disingenuous. It's meant to be enigmatic back-and-forth repartee, but it lacks wit or charm. The character development arcs are very fast and difficult to believe. Also, the timeline is extremely confusing - the protagonist was a child living with her grandma just four years earlier, but is now a mid-20s hardened killer? How long did she spend in the interim with Neizghani? Sometimes it sounds like one year, sometimes it sounds like fifteen.
Lastly, the final third of the book - building up to the climax - loses the plot a bit. It stops being a Western (which made it interesting) and just becomes a fantasy battle, which is a shame. I wasn't invested in any of the characters, so deaths and battles felt like nothing was at stake. And the twists in the plot were hard to follow, and felt pointless because (again) I wasn't invested in the characters.
All in all, I think the book had a good, imaginative premise and comes from a different literary perspective than most stuff I read. But it fails to live up to the promise, unfortunately.