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A review by nooralshanti
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
3.0
Trail of Lightning is a much darker book than I would normally read, but I have been looking for speculative fiction that features First Nations protagonists, written by people who actually are First Nations, for a while now as most of what I've been able to find has been non-fiction or historical fiction. Anyway, various aspects of Navajo culture were woven into the story throughout and they are what kept me interested and reading even when the book got a little too dark for my tastes.
The book follows the main character as she struggles to uncover the hand behind the rise of monsters in the post-apocalyptic Dinetah: a territory in part of the US which has ended up being relatively sheltered from a post-apocalyptic flooding event that decimated most of the US. The main character is a monster-slayer, a gun wielding killing machine with "clan-powers" enhancing her fighting abilities and giving her an almost superhuman ability to fight. So who better to track down the monsters and the evil "witch" who created them than her, right? It's an interesting premise that hooked me at the start, but in the end, I stayed mostly for the hints of Navajo/Dine culture.
By the way there will be spoilers ahead.
The main character lacked focus and just kept getting roped into random tough situations by someone she KNEW was untrustworthy and a trickster. Despite knowing this she just did what he suggested and followed his leads without thinking much of the time, without having her own plan, and so all the "reveals" and "betrayals" at the end felt extremely anticlimactic.
She was also a very typical "broken, gun-wielding, bad-ass female character" with - you guessed it - a tragic love story gone wrong/relationship problems. Which would have been tolerable, but for all her gun-wielding she ended up having completely no agency in the end and the story ended up being about which of her two lovers she was going to choose. This took the focus off the actual monster-hunting plot and so it felt like all the killing and gore was just random and meaningless a lot of the time.
This is sounding more negative than I intended. Like I said, I did manage to stay interested in it and to finish it to the end, I appreciated the fact that it included a Navajo character and portrayed the culture, but the plot and characterizations just didn't live up to the promise of the idea.
It also left me with a few questions, especially after reading some reviews that suggested it may be appropriating the spirituality of the Dine a little bit.
1) Is it really respectful to the Dine to portray their spirituality in a way where these superhuman figures have nothing better to do than set up an elaborate plot just to have two people fight for a crowd/bets in a random bar somewhere?
2) Is the level of gore and seemingly senseless fighting really respectful to the Dine?
3) If the Dine in Dinetah are the only ones that survived the apocalyptic flooding and are seemingly doing well inside their walls/borders why don't we see any examples of their progress? I mean, really, it's a huge missed opportunity to make them survive this post-apocalyptic event into the future and then just not show them being awesome. And no, Maggie doesn't count as awesome in my book, she just kills people and monsters. The lawdogs just bully people. Other characters own bars or run smuggling rings or gangs. I didn't see a single character who was trying to BUILD something in this post-apocalyptic world. Huge wasted opportunity. If you're going to throw off the shackles of the current political system that is contributing to First Nations peoples' continued oppression then you should show them making the best of that - starting to rebuild.
Anyway, I would probably recommend this one to lovers of the type of urban fantasy that's focused more on the fighting and the romantic entanglements. It's - I wouldn't say a page-turner, but it's fast paced in general. And keep in mind it is a pretty dark book.
The book follows the main character as she struggles to uncover the hand behind the rise of monsters in the post-apocalyptic Dinetah: a territory in part of the US which has ended up being relatively sheltered from a post-apocalyptic flooding event that decimated most of the US. The main character is a monster-slayer, a gun wielding killing machine with "clan-powers" enhancing her fighting abilities and giving her an almost superhuman ability to fight. So who better to track down the monsters and the evil "witch" who created them than her, right? It's an interesting premise that hooked me at the start, but in the end, I stayed mostly for the hints of Navajo/Dine culture.
By the way there will be spoilers ahead.
The main character lacked focus and just kept getting roped into random tough situations by someone she KNEW was untrustworthy and a trickster. Despite knowing this she just did what he suggested and followed his leads without thinking much of the time, without having her own plan, and so all the "reveals" and "betrayals" at the end felt extremely anticlimactic.
She was also a very typical "broken, gun-wielding, bad-ass female character" with - you guessed it - a tragic love story gone wrong/relationship problems. Which would have been tolerable, but for all her gun-wielding she ended up having completely no agency in the end and the story ended up being about which of her two lovers she was going to choose. This took the focus off the actual monster-hunting plot and so it felt like all the killing and gore was just random and meaningless a lot of the time.
This is sounding more negative than I intended. Like I said, I did manage to stay interested in it and to finish it to the end, I appreciated the fact that it included a Navajo character and portrayed the culture, but the plot and characterizations just didn't live up to the promise of the idea.
It also left me with a few questions, especially after reading some reviews that suggested it may be appropriating the spirituality of the Dine a little bit.
1) Is it really respectful to the Dine to portray their spirituality in a way where these superhuman figures have nothing better to do than set up an elaborate plot just to have two people fight for a crowd/bets in a random bar somewhere?
2) Is the level of gore and seemingly senseless fighting really respectful to the Dine?
3) If the Dine in Dinetah are the only ones that survived the apocalyptic flooding and are seemingly doing well inside their walls/borders why don't we see any examples of their progress? I mean, really, it's a huge missed opportunity to make them survive this post-apocalyptic event into the future and then just not show them being awesome. And no, Maggie doesn't count as awesome in my book, she just kills people and monsters. The lawdogs just bully people. Other characters own bars or run smuggling rings or gangs. I didn't see a single character who was trying to BUILD something in this post-apocalyptic world. Huge wasted opportunity. If you're going to throw off the shackles of the current political system that is contributing to First Nations peoples' continued oppression then you should show them making the best of that - starting to rebuild.
Anyway, I would probably recommend this one to lovers of the type of urban fantasy that's focused more on the fighting and the romantic entanglements. It's - I wouldn't say a page-turner, but it's fast paced in general. And keep in mind it is a pretty dark book.