Yes, we might be living in the darkest timeline—or the dumbest, hard to tell. But be glad that you’re not our girl Jane, who contends with cruel racism and incompetence while also decapitating hungry “shamblers,” the reanimated corpses of the Gettysburg fallen and any poor soul bitten thereafter. Some years ago, the paddy wagon plucked Jane McKeene from her home at Rose Hill plantation so that she might learn the finer points of combat and decorum at Miss Preston’s, Baltimore’s finest school for Negro girls. […]
YA + Alternative History + Zombies!!
Justina Ireland’s 2018 YA novel Dread Nation was one of New York Public Library’s Winter 2018 Picks for Young Adults. When I read the brief description about alternative history and zombies and then saw the totally badass cover over on Amazon, I had to read it. Although it clocks in at over 400 pages, I zipped through it in no time, and all I can say is that there had better be a sequel soon! Set in the 1870s, Ireland shows her readers an America […]
“It’s a cruel, cruel world. And the people are the worst part.”
In Justina Ireland’s America, nobody won the Civil War. The war simply never ended, because of the shamblers. The shamblers are the dead that rose up from the battlefields of Gettysburg and began to walk, hungry for blood and flesh. The country needed to band together to fight this new threat, and the war simply petered out. Most of the cities in the South are simply gone. Burned. Destroyed. Overrun by shamblers. The cities in the North are doing slightly better, but its hard to […]
There is literally no place in American history that’ll be awesome for me.
REVIEW OF BOTH KINDRED (Octavia E. Butler) & DREAD NATION (Justina Ireland) It was just by chance that I happened to read Dread Nation and Kindred at the same time, but it was hard not to draw parallels between the two books. Issues of gender, power, and the complexities of race as well as strong female narrators bind the two across the vast distance of their publication dates. Both books have interesting layers, and comparing and contrasting them would make a great literary analysis essay, but […]