Dread Nation (Justina Ireland)
Jun. 3rd, 2019 09:57 pmSo, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija is hosting this thing where people are challenged to post everything they read in June and I said I'd do it only I wouldn't have time unless I just wrote a couple of sentences for each one, and then of course I wrote more than a couple of sentences for this one :P
Dread Nation 3+/5 - properly should go in a Lodestar post, but I'll probably forget what I wanted to say by that time. This was actually quite good, and I liked it more than any of the actual Hugo nominees except Spinning Silver (though this is not a high bar this year). In this book, the undead invade the US around the time of the Civil War (in a clever inversion, Sherman's March to the Sea is actually Sherman trying to protect the Southerners by setting fire to the undead), thus giving rise to training schools in which the Negro learns how to defend her white betters from the undead. In case you couldn't tell from that, race relations are strained and the book is interested in examining that. In addition, there's a "Survivalist party" in the book which... is clearly meant to have resonance to a modern reader, what with "all that 'America will be safe again' nonsense." (At least no one wears AWBSA clothing. Then again, I suppose it's a rather more awkward set of letters.)
This was interesting to read after discussing "Beneath a Sugar Sky" and its cavalier approach to compassion, because certainly compassion, and the question of whether and how much compassion we ought to have for those who have treated us poorly, is something that is thought about a lot in this book, although somewhat inconsistently, and I'm not sure whether the inconsistency is because of uneven writing or because of narrator unreliability. But I really liked that different characters thought different things about it, and the same character even does different relevant actions during the course of the book. I'm a little side-eyeing the narrator's ostensible conclusions (again, the narrator is clearly unreliable when it comes to understanding herself, so it's not clear how much we're supposed to buy into it), but it looks like there's going to be a sequel, so... we'll see.
It's generally well written; only rarely did I feel like a word stuck out. (I don't think "OK" was used in the twentieth-century sense at the time? ETA: I have been informed that indeed it was. Ireland: 1, cahn: 0 :D ) At times I felt like the structure wasn't perfectly smooth, but this was very minor.
rachelmanija is hosting this thing where people are challenged to post everything they read in June and I said I'd do it only I wouldn't have time unless I just wrote a couple of sentences for each one, and then of course I wrote more than a couple of sentences for this one :PDread Nation 3+/5 - properly should go in a Lodestar post, but I'll probably forget what I wanted to say by that time. This was actually quite good, and I liked it more than any of the actual Hugo nominees except Spinning Silver (though this is not a high bar this year). In this book, the undead invade the US around the time of the Civil War (in a clever inversion, Sherman's March to the Sea is actually Sherman trying to protect the Southerners by setting fire to the undead), thus giving rise to training schools in which the Negro learns how to defend her white betters from the undead. In case you couldn't tell from that, race relations are strained and the book is interested in examining that. In addition, there's a "Survivalist party" in the book which... is clearly meant to have resonance to a modern reader, what with "all that 'America will be safe again' nonsense." (At least no one wears AWBSA clothing. Then again, I suppose it's a rather more awkward set of letters.)
This was interesting to read after discussing "Beneath a Sugar Sky" and its cavalier approach to compassion, because certainly compassion, and the question of whether and how much compassion we ought to have for those who have treated us poorly, is something that is thought about a lot in this book, although somewhat inconsistently, and I'm not sure whether the inconsistency is because of uneven writing or because of narrator unreliability. But I really liked that different characters thought different things about it, and the same character even does different relevant actions during the course of the book. I'm a little side-eyeing the narrator's ostensible conclusions (again, the narrator is clearly unreliable when it comes to understanding herself, so it's not clear how much we're supposed to buy into it), but it looks like there's going to be a sequel, so... we'll see.
It's generally well written; only rarely did I feel like a word stuck out. (I don't think "OK" was used in the twentieth-century sense at the time? ETA: I have been informed that indeed it was. Ireland: 1, cahn: 0 :D ) At times I felt like the structure wasn't perfectly smooth, but this was very minor.
