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 […]
A gift that keeps on giving
I’m finally getting around to reading one of the books I got in last year’s book exchange! (And a book I am currently lending to a coworker!) I like it, but it’s not quite what I was expecting. It kind of reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Ugly Little Boy.” In that story, scientists have pulled a Neanderthal child from the past to study it, almost like they are studying the children in The Girl With All the Gifts. Basically, the […]