Dread Nation

Things I loved: The cover. The nuanced take on racial identity and racial passing, especially as the main characters' back stories spin out. Katherine. The weapons and clothes. The moral complexity and ambiguity in interactions with the no-longer-alive and the oppressors. The lack of a romantic subplot.

Things I liked: Jane (her internal dialogue was off to me, though). The treatment of sexuality. The setting (but did we really need two of them?). Many of the minor characters. The dialogue, especially between Jane and Katherine. The battle scenes (action scenes in books usually bore me into flipping pages but not these).

Things I disliked: The inclusion of some paper thin characters (especially the sex workers and the Native American character). The meandering to a cliff-hanger end (I didn't realize this was part of a series - if I had I probably would not have bought it).

Hoping this becomes a movie. And maybe a video game.

Strong 4.5. Thoroughly enjoyable Civil War alt-history/zombie invasion story with a KICKASS and hilarious heroine. Come for the amazing social/political commentary on zombies as allegory for race/immigrant relations, stay for the humor, action, and cliffhanger suspense. Note: For a zombie book the violence isn't graphic, with the exception of one scene where Jane gets a historically accurate punishment, it's really hard to read/listen to. My only (minor) quibble is that Jane's voice and expressions are modern, but that's also part of the fun. Excellent (as always) audio by Bahni Turpin who continues to amaze with her character voice choices.

So, as a general rule, I don't read zombie stories. Zombies are the one monster that will almost invariably give me nightmares. This book, however, had such hype built up around it that I decided to bend my rule.

I should not have.

Before I start in on this, let me say it's a good story. It's well-written, the plot is paced nicely, and it's entertaining. All that said, it's quite problematic in many ways. I knew some of this before I read it; there was a Twitter thread about some of the issues, namely that in the Author's Note she describes the Native American boarding schools (where the government forced Native American children to go, and tried to destroy their heritage and culture in the name of “civilizing” them) as “well-meaning.” The Twitter thread does an excellent job of dissecting that passage, and it's worth reading.

There's also the incredibly unrealistic scene where Jane gets flogged eleven times, walks back to where she's staying, has a coherent conversation where she lays out a plan she has formed, and then puts a shirt on. That last part especially got me. Like, what? You're going to be in more pain than that! Being flogged barely seems to slow Jane down. She asks for laudanum - for her plan. Not to take for the pain.

I don't know. There's a lot about the book that set my teeth on edge. There's the absurd amount of racism, but the protagonist is a black woman and it's civil war era, so that's to be expected. And it's coming from characters, not from narration. Jane lies. A lot. So it's hard to trust that she's even a reliable narrator.

I guess it's okay. I didn't care for it. I found it really hard to get past the author's “well-meaning” comment about the Native American boarding schools. And the plot of “as soon as they're old enough, black children get sent to combat schools.” Especially with what's going on lately with the jailing of migrant children, it feels tone-deaf, ignorant, and genocidal.

One good point was the oh-so-casual mention of bisexuality (a female friend taught her “everything she knows about kissing”) but it was only two sentences and never mentioned again. Not nearly enough to make up for the rest of the book.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

Justina Ireland gives us a beauty of an adventure through the eyes of Jane. Jane's story is challenging. She works hard. What makes the story such a delight is Jane's remarkable spirit, quick wit, deep love, and courage.

Even terrible zombies, racist jerks, and a society bent on making her life miserable do not keep Jane down.


I can't wait to follow along in her head for the next book in the series.

This book was great. I loved the premise and Jane McKeene. She's smart and fierce and I loved being in her head. Except for the romance, which felt kind of pointless as there was zero chemistry between the two, I loved Jane's relationships, especially with the ones with Katherine and her mom, even if the latter was explored mostly by letters. The plot was a little slow going at time, but I was still engaged until the end.

On a more serious note, the book is centered around the experience of discrimination and oppression and while I did find a lot of value in the message, I felt it was incomplete. The focus was only on African Americans' experience and very little about Native Americans'. Her inspiration for the Combat School were the Native Residential Schools which were “boarding schools” where Native children, after being separated from their families, were abused and forcefully stripped of their culture and heritage. This horrendous part of history was swept under the rug and I doubt many people are aware of it. The consequences of these practices are still affecting Native communities today. What happened to them is just as bad and I think it's important to acknowledge that.

Aside from that, great premise, great characters (with few exceptions) and great mystery.

Edited July 2020 to include a critical link to the Native representation in the book: Twitter Thread on Justina Ireland's DREAD NATION .

I liked Dread Nation for many reasons. It's the type of book I go out off my way to read. Own voice, diverse characters, LGBTQA+ representation.

Honestly, there are white cis male authors I enjoy, but I don't particular feel I need more of that perspective in my life to the extent I have to do looking for it – that POV tends to find us all. Even in this novel, we wrestle with the powers that be thinking the color of their skin makes them more favored in the eyes of God, more valuable, more deserving of wealth and safety.

The difference is that Justina Ireland treats this perspective as the evil it is.

I enjoyed the story through out, but it never transcended into love. I'm glad I read it, I never got impatient for it to end, I was intrigued at where the plot was going, concerned about the characters. tense when the shamblers (zombies) were shambling, appreciative of the subtext that spoke to racism, colorism, shooting unarmed black men and women out of unfounded fear, and happy that a very important character was clearly written as asexual, while the main character seems quite possibly bi.

I don't know if I bought the discussions where the last details emerged. The asexuality reveal felt natural enough, but it seems to me that during that time period people often felt same sex attraction without really identifying it in those terms. This might just be me not reading the right books written in this time period, but I've read books that definitely made me wonder, but no one at the time the story was written, or the diary passage, or the letter seemed to think twice about it.

I'm open to suggestions that will prove me wrong about homosexuality or bisexuality being on the radar of your average person back then.

Oh, I loved that Jane was reading Tom Sawyer, and how I thought I knew exactly what she was reading based on the version we all know, but this version is set in a world where the dead roam. :)

And Tom Sawyer, of course. I???ve taken a liking to the little urchin, and I???d like to see where he ends up. It seems the boy is always running afoul of a pack of shamblers in the midst of his Missouri adventures, and the boy???s derring-do reminds me of my own exploits.

I look forward to the next book in the series! And, to be shallow, the next book cover which I hope si just as stunning!

I didn't expect to love this book, but I do. I love to hear the way that the narrator code switches when Jane is trying to convince the people of Summerland that she is ‘safe'. I love the way she was able to do the right thing even when ‘she wasn't allowed'. There were not a ton of zobmies or shamblers as they were called in the story, but I liked the amount that was there. I can't say that zombie fiction is my favorite thing.
Overall, the world building in this book is amazing and the characters are well constructed. This is a wonderful book with lots of little lessons if you are looking.

I've always found alternate histories to be interesting thought experiments. In this case, what if the North won the Civil War...because the dead rose on the battlefield at Gettysburg. In this world, slavery has been abolished, but Black people (along with Native Americans) are still treated as inferior to whites and young women, in particular, are placed in boarding schools to train them to protect white people from the very much still present threat of the dead. Jane and Katherine, two teenage Black girls, find themselves exiled from their exclusive combat school to the country's frontier, where they discover that there is much more to the state of things than they'd been lead to believe. The characters are compelling, and while the plot doesn't always entirely work, it definitely hooked me and I'm very interested in reading the sequel!

Pros: interesting characters, excellent worldbuilding, fast paced

Cons:

Jane McKeene is in her final year at Miss Preston's School of Combat for Negro Girls. At 17 she's trained to become an Attendant, to protect a white young lady from shamblers - the undead - and protect her modesty from amorous young men. But what she really wants is to return home to Rose Hill and her plantation owning Momma.

Though the war between the North and South was set aside to deal with the undead as they rose, racial tensions haven't eased, and some people believe the shamblers are God's punishment for trying to make all men equal. These men build communities behind walls. But can walls really keep the monsters of the world out?

When a friend of Jane's asks for help finding his missing sister, Jane stumbles into trouble even her combat training hasn't prepared her for.

I absolutely loved Jane and was astonished at how self-aware she was for a seventeen year old. She recognizes that she lies a lot and acknowledges her other faults, even as she often revels in rule breaking. She's impulsive and often later regrets her actions but can't stop herself from acting first and thinking later, a trait that actually saves her life on occasion. She's also really smart, though realizes that there's often safety in appearing to be less intelligent than she is.

Katherine was also great. I liked that her animosity with Jane was due to superficial things, so it didn't feel manufactured when they started becoming friends.

As a Canadian, I don't know much about the American Civil War or it's immediate aftermath, so I don't know to what extent things have been twisted here, though I did recognize the names of a few of the Generals referenced. There's an author afterward talking about the Indian residential schools that come up in the book and how she used them as a template for her training schools.

I thought the author incorporated the zombies into the history quite well. Due to the period in which the book is set, some offensive language is used. The 'n' word is not, but other slurs do appear. This made parts of the book uncomfortable to read, but it's the discomfort of how horribly some people treated others.

This is a brilliant book and I highly recommend it.

What a book this was! I was not expecting to love this as much as I did. Jane McKeene has now joined the gang of my favourite characters of all time. She's a liar and a cheat but she's also hilarious, clever, and is a good person. We're shown all of this through her actions without just being told and she had one of the best voices I've ever read. All of the side characters were interesting and complex as well and I loved everybody in this book. The way this book talks about racism in a setting we all have heard of but never lived in was done incredibly well. It kept me on my toes the whole time and I'm beyond excited for the next book. The only reason this wasn't a full five star read for me was that the plot itself was lacking. Looking back, I can't pinpoint any sort of build or climax; it was more of just events all happening. The ending also made me think of Divergent and I wasn't a fan of that. But, overall, an incredible and surprising read.