TL;DR
Overall rating: 5/5
Genre: Historical fiction; speculative fiction
Length: 464 pages
One-sentence summary: An alternative-history zombie thriller that takes place after the U.S. Civil War ends--not with the South's surrender, but when the dead begin to rise up on the battlefields of Gettysburg.
Tough topics: violence & death (appropriate to a book about zombie hunters), racism, racial slurs of the 19th century (no n-word)
Read-alikes: Beloved, by Toni Morrison; The Forest of Hands and Teeth, by Carrie Ryan; Wilder Girls, by Rory Power
Available formats: Order the print version for pickup on campus or curbside. Borrow the audio and electronic formats through the Sora app or SoraApp.com.
In an alternate history, the American Civil War ends not when the South surrenders, but when the dead rise up from the battlefields and walk again, hunting down the living folk and turning them to fellow "shamblers" with one bite. Our protagonist, Jane McKeene, is biracial and so was forced by the government's Native and Negro Reeducation Act to attend a combat school. Jane and her classmate, Katherine, are nearly done training to be zombie-slaying body guards to white folks when they (and some friends) are abducted and sent to a dangerous frontier town to serve as border patrol.
I listened to Dread Nation via the Sora app and was totally surprised when I discovered the print book is nearly 500 pages long! The plot of the book is exciting and moves quickly--it never dragged and I was never bored. Jane is quick-witted and confident, but not always likeable; she's opinionated and quick to anger. She is also self-reflective, though, and tries to overcome the less pleasant aspects of her personality as she recognizes them. Katherine is frustrated by the fact that her beauty causes people to constantly underestimate her, and she has an interesting internal conflict over her ability to pass as white.
There are a lot of interesting conversations happening in the book, which could provoke some interesting real-life dialogue, too. Jane is initially jealous of Catherine, who is prettier, fairer-skinned, and more ladylike than she is. The two don't magically become friends, either; their assumptions around color and femininity are explicitly addressed.
The novel has much to say about institutional racism, too. I mean, the combat schools force Black and indigenous children to learn how to protect white people against literal zombies, and this is considered a privilege, given that the alternative is to fight hordes of them on the front lines of the war against the undead. Combat school less prestigious than the one Jane attends only train their charges for six months, and the results are deeply uncomfortable: “Half the Negroes from those programs end up a shambler their first month on the job.” The system is structured to offer people of color just enough to make white people seem benevolent, but not enough to provide any substantive good. Yikes.
On a more light-hearted note, characters in the novel are bi- and asexual, but the book isn't about that--that's just who the characters are. The conversation in which characters reveal this to each other explicitly is really lovely.
I recommend this one to everyone, seriously, although I think Black readers and women might will find it exceptionally meaningful. I'm reading the sequel, Deathless Divide, right now. I'll let you know how it goes!
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