Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

[lightreads]

Trail of Lightning

3/5. Gritty fantasy set on a reservation post climate apocalypse, when legends and gods are starting to walk again.

I loved the worldbuilding here, but otherwise did not like this as much as everyone else seems to. Mostly I didn't actually enjoy spending time with either of the main characters. He is the sort of guy who will mansplain "women like [thing that all women apparently like with the subtext of 'before I stick my dick in them.'] He is more complex than that, and maybe he's interesting to some people, but he's exactly the sort of guy I deliberately make zero time for in real life, so. And as for her – well, she's more interesting, but her arc is deeply concerned with, like, the violence within and am I truly evil I must be and etc. etc. blah blah blah. Been there. Have the t-shirt. Their prickly friendship was okay, but their romance did not move the needle even a hair for me.

That was all more scathing than this book deserves. If you want interesting and occasionally bloody fantasy peopled by majority PoC characters and underpinned by a mythology I have previously only ever encountered by way of white authors appropriating it, here you go.

Comments

[jadelennox]

I just read this one last week as well. My reaction was colored by how very much it reminded me of Joseph Bruchac's "Killer of Enemies" trilogy (for which the last book is actually called Arrow of Lightning), and yet I haven't seen a single person discussing the Roanhorse namecheck Bruchac in their lists of comparable books. I mean, you don't want to compare books just because they're both post-apocalyptic books by Native authors, but when they're both recent post-apocalyptic SF books about a southwestern Native heroine (both by an author who is from a different native nation from the protagonist), with a heroine who has fighting skills and a magical superpower which she uses to fight magical monsters or cooperate with magical allies from indigenous myth and religion, while trying to protect her loved ones in a dystopian American southwest where thuggish forces have taken unfair levels of control...

Well.

Ten years ago I would have put it down to the same people not reading YA and adult SF, but that's not true anymore, so I spent a lot of the book confused. I'm not saying that Roanhorse copied Bruchac at all! And she's a better writer. It just tainted my reading experience; since the books were so similar and yet Bruchac didn't appear in any of the Roanhorse buzz I kept expecting the book to go somewhere very different from Bruchac. Extratextual forces coloring my reading experience. (In actuality it probably was just mostly adult F&SF readers being far less well-read in YA than they think they are.)

In any case, I more or less agree with you. It was well-written and I liked the world-building, but I disliked all the major male characters, and while I loved one of the female characters (Grace) she is too minor character.

[lightreads]

Yes, agreed on Grace. I had one of those 'is it weird that I particularly like the white woman?' but I had very little engagement with her kids so. I think it's just one of those things.

Interesting. I'm vaguely aware of Bruchac but could not have told you what the books were about, as a point of reference. But then again, YA isn't really directly my thing.