Blood and guts and the climate apocalypse

[bloodygranuaile]

 I missed it when the BSpec book club read Rebecca Roanhorse's Trail of Lightning, but I wanted to read it anyway so I stole Gillian's copy and read it this weekend. It's a YA/adult crossover sort of book, so it reads pretty fast. It's an excellent beach read, for my own personal definition of "beach read," which usually means it's very violent so it's good for reading in hot weather when your brain is melting out your ears, preferably indoors and nowhere near a beach. (Yes, I have an English degree, but in a certain sense I also have the literary tastes of an eight-year-old boy. Just explosions and jokes, please; hold all the boring feelings and stuff.) 

 

Trail of Lightning is a post-apocalyptic Western (Southwestern?) grounded in Navajo mythology; after the climate apocalypse has destroyed most of North America, the Dine--the remnants of the Navajo nation--hang out on their surviving area of not-drowned land and are periodically attacked by monsters. Our protagonist is Maggie Hoskie, a late teenage (or possibly early 20s?) orphan turned monster fighter, former apprentice of a monster-slaying god whomst is kind of an asshole. Maggie's clan powers--two magical powers, each inherited from a parent's family--are "running really fast" and "killing really good," which makes her an excellent monster slayer. Maggie runs in the tradition of a certain type of grouchy, angry, unsociable, severely traumatized action hero, and the emotional arc of the book largely involves her beginning to learn how to people again. Toward this end we have the love interest, Kai, who, due to Maggie's emotionally-crippled-GI-Joe character type, avoids the annoying Mr Darcy/Brooding YA Hero tropes and is instead friendly, socially adept, good-humored, and otherwise crafted specifically for the task of resocializing Maggie. It works pretty well; he's pretty funny and he's also a useful character, being a medicine man in training, and a very powerful one. 

 

Kai and Maggie and a secondary cast of post-apocalyptically grumpy ass-kicking types spend three hundred pages or so hunting wildly creepy monsters and dealing with cruel and manipulative gods, including the incredibly obnoxious Coyote, and getting blood and guts everywhere in the process. At one point there is a cat goddess who is also a bookie; she was a great character and I wouldn't have minded more of her. 

 

I don't really have the brain right now to describe the monsters, and also I don't want to give anything away, but be assured they are incredibly creepy and when Maggie and co. kill them it is incredibly satisfying. Just absolutely A+ monster-hunting, would hunt again, will happily read sequels.