Review

Black Sun and Fevered Star

/ Denise / 3 Comments

by Rebecca Roanhorse, the first two books of the Between Earth and Sky series

Book covers of Black Sun and Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse with shadows of birds in the background.

I love it when fantasy stories take place somewhere other than a medieval England/Europe setting.  Don’t get me wrong – I appreciate Tolkien and his influence and the many streams that branched off from there.  But whether it’s N.K. Jemisin’s Dreamblood duology (ancient Egypt), S. A. Chakraborty’s Daevabad trilogy (Middle East/North Africa), or Alina Boyden’s Stealing Thunder (India, and with a trans heroine), creating fantasy worlds drawn from different societies, different geographies, different cultures, and different time periods is so much fun. (And there are so many more I could talk about, but then we’ll never get to the actual review.) 

Rebecca Roanhorse’s Between Earth and Sky series (Black Sun and the recently released Fevered Star) takes Mesoamerican/borderland societies/settings (with some Polynesian sailing influences as well) as her steppingstone in a story about a corrupt political structure, religious zealotry, magic, superstitions, and survival.

Black Sun follows four characters, bouncing between their perspectives: Serapio, destined to be the Crow god reborn and avenge his people, the Carrion Crow; Captain Xiala, a Teek sailor who we meet in jail after her night of drinking and seducing, hired to transport Serapio to the city of Tova; Naranpa, the Sun Priest, head of the Watchers who rule Tova and keep the peace, determined to root out corruption and guide the Watchers back to their original purpose; and Okoa, son of the matron of the Carrion Crow, trained as a warrior in a society that has forsworn war.

As we soon learn, the convergence approaches, aligned with a solar eclipse on the winter solstice.  Prophecy hints that when the sun is at its weakest, the Crow god will destroy it.  And as the planets move into position, so too do our characters converge on Tova.

I can’t talk too much about the plot for Fevered Star without giving away major plot points for Black Sun, so suffice it to say that Roanhouse delivers a solid sequel that gives us more insight into the world she created.  There’s the usual second book issue of feeling like it was really setting up even bigger things while leaving them for the next installment.  It definitely left me impatient for the next book.  Since this was just released a month ago, however, I’m going to have to wait. But it’s clear the gods aren’t done yet with the people of Meridian and the people have their own plans as well.

Overall, I enjoyed both books.  I really liked the world that’s created and most of the characters.  There are assassin priests, non-binary and queer characters, and a nice dose of various kinds of magic.  Serapio and Xiala are both fascinating and I loved reading their chapters.  I sympathized with Naranpa, but found Okoa’s chapters a bit of a weak link.  Thankfully, Serapio and Xiala get a lot of page time in Black Sun, though not as much in Fevered Star.  When you read Black Sun, by the way, pay attention to the dates at the beginning of each chapter – there’s a lot of jumping around, timewise.  Fevered Star is more straight-forward, chronologically speaking, and gives us some additional character voices. 

There’s a line from a Tori Amos song (“Bliss”) that asks “what it means to be/made of you but not enough of you” that kept floating back into my head as I read.  There is a theme of exploring culture and blood while being an outsider, raised away from your family or your people.  Fevered Star in particular delves into what happens when a child who never had a chance to be part of their community can finally return as an adult, with mostly only second-hand knowledge about their heritage. 

There’s a hint of Roanhorse’s own background in that, but it also ties in to a much longer and darker history in the United States and Canada of white governments stealing indigenous children, shipping them off to boarding schools, and quite literally trying to beat their culture and language out of them, not only physically separating them from their families, but linguistically and culturally as well.  (Some ties to themes from Almanac of the Dead fit in here as well.) It’s deftly handled and not a blunt object with which you’re hit on the head, but if you know, it’s a connection that you can glimpse and ponder.  Or you can focus on a fascinating fantasy world sailing seas, climbing cliffs, and watching the sun go black, wondering what comes next. Or both!  Regardless, it’s a great way to spend your time. 

When I bought Fevered Star, I debated whether I should jump right into it or if I should re-read Black Sun first.  I ended up going back to the beginning and I’m glad I did.  I liked being able to revisit the world and I especially liked being able to move straight into the next book when it ended.  (It’s so hard reading series as they come out because I hate waiting for the next one, but I also like knowing that there’s still going to be more.  Also, it’s better for the author if we’re reading stuff as it comes out, since it reassures publishers that it’s worth sticking with!) So do yourself a favor and make sure you have Fevered Star on hand as you approach the end of Black Sun! And then when the next book comes out, we can do it all again.     

Find them online:

Black Sun

Fevered Star

Book Review: The Hunger by Alma Katsu

/ Denise / 1 Comment

I’m so excited to get to this book! Alma Katsu is definitely one of my new favorite authors. The Hunger is the second book of hers I’ve devoured. (If you’ll excuse the pun. Or even if you won’t.) She has a brand new book out called The Fervor, which I really want to get and read right now, but I’m forcing myself not to get any new books until I finish my current stack (which means I need to talk with work about how I can get a sabbatical, even though that isn’t a thing in my industry).

But in the meantime, I get to talk about The Hunger!

Cover of The Hunger, with a snowy tree, black tree sculpture and moon, and a dark shadow framing it.

Set on the ol’ Oregon Trail, this book follows the infamous Donner Party as they try to make their way to California. Now, like many people around my age, the bulk of my knowledge regarding pioneer trail life comes from the early computer game, Oregon Trail.  It was always a great day to walk into the computer lab, sit down in front of the old green screen computers, and push those giant floppy disks into the disk drive.  Then the decision-making began: what kind of profession should you choose?  Banker with money to buy provisions? Carpenter with better of odds of fixing the inevitable breakdowns of the wagon? (I never chose farmer.)

But when you left was the most important decision.  Leave too early and risk getting stuck waiting for your path to clear.  Choosing to leave to late, however, almost certainly condemned you to a cold, hungry, miserable death in the snowy mountain passes (assuming you even made it that far without drowning in the river, dying of dysentery, or losing your oxen). 

In real life, the Donner Party “chose poorly,” leaving much too late and taking their sweet time as they started. Katsu really captures that sense of urgency that some members of the party have, realizing this is not going to end well if they don’t get moving, but not wanting to leave the safety of the group. Slowly, it began to dawn on the rest of them that their provisions weren’t going to last forever. As their hunger increased, the distinct absence of game to hunt became ever more noticeable. Who – or what – was competing with them for food?

While I don’t remember ever actually learning about the doomed Donner debacle, I clearly absorbed it somewhere, but only the broad strokes – a group of hopeful pioneers who sought to find a shorter route to California, misjudged the time it would take, became trapped in the mountains, and eventually resorted to cannibalism.  That’s all I knew. 

That didn’t matter in the least though in being able to enjoy this book. It’s creepy and suspenseful, as an insatiable hunger stalks the wagon train. Katsu does a brilliant job of weaving the historical with the fantastical and creating a story you don’t want to stop.  (If I was still a student, this would be the kind of book that I secretly hide inside the textbook to make it look like I’m doing the assigned reading.  Although let’s be honest, I would have already completed the assigned reading too.)

The novel jumps from different characters perspectives as they move out along the trail.  Tragedy strikes early when a horribly mutilated corpse is found on the prairie.  Try as they might to convince themselves that it was an unfortunate animal attack, a sense of uneasiness takes root.  In addition to a shadowed horror, the group also tackles the rising tensions spinning out from a lack of strong leadership, competing personalities, wealth and status differences, and the sheer struggle of surviving the elements.  When they finally find themselves stranded, as we knew they would, all those horrors combine into a seemingly inescapable maw.

I have a deep appreciation for authors who can sweep a reader into history.  Obviously, this is fiction, but Katsu keeps everything grounded in the characters’ reality, with a supernatural element.  Writing from multiple characters’ perspectives can be hit or miss, but I enjoyed jumping around from person to person. We see how the struggles of the trail played out differently for individuals, while also learning what drove them west.   

And if you like this one, I also strongly recommend The Deep, the first book of hers that I read. I found it accidentally while looking for another book of the same title (which I also recommend).  Katsu’s The Deep follows a young woman recovering from the trauma of surviving the sinking of the Titanic.  As World War I rages, a fellow survivor offers her a job working as a nurse on the Britannica, Titanic’s sister ship drafted into becoming a hospital ship.  The story jumps between the two ships and slowly begins to unlock the same darkness haunting both. 

Stayed tuned here and eventually I’ll get to The Fervor as well!

Find The Hunger online:

Author’s website

Bookshop.org

Book Review: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

/ Denise / Leave a comment
Book Sea Of Tranquility standing up in front of a photograph of stacked rocks at sunset.

When I was in 7th or 8th grade, I read The Hot Zone, which traced the history of Ebola outbreaks, including one at a monkey house in the United States.  It hooked me.  For a time, I imagined myself becoming a scientist, traveling around the world, studying diseases.  And somewhere, in one of the multiverses, that’s what I did.  But in this universe, I went into history while retaining a fascination with reading about diseases and outbreaks and pandemics – real and fictional.  (There’s going to be a point to this, I promise.)

So a few years ago, when I heard about Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, a story of survivors of a terrible flu pandemic, I started reading it and stayed up most of the night to finish it.  As soon as I saw her next book, The Glass Hotel, I grabbed that too (even though it wasn’t about a disease.  Well, there was a lot about capitalism and unchecked greed.  So maybe it was).  It took me a bit longer to connect with that one, but I enjoyed it and found the characters compelling. 

Sleeping dog with ear on the cover of Sea of Tranquility book
My dog decided she’d sleep for me

Then I picked up Sea of Tranquility a few days ago and once again I had to accept that I was going to miss my bedtime.  (One of the perks of being an adult is that I don’t have to tell my parents I’m scared of the dark and need the hall light on when I go to bed, so I can then crawl to the edge of the door and read that way.  I can just stay on the couch.)

I loved how her style of writing in the first few chapters moves quickly, with short, fast-flowing paragraphs written in third-person present tense. By the time it transitions into a more standard format, I was hooked. (In fact, as I was going back through the first few pages to re-experience it so I could try to capture what it was like, I almost fell right back in to re-reading the whole thing.)

We open with a young Englishman named Edwin sailing to Canada in 1912.  He has no plan, no idea of what he will do in Canada.  As the youngest son in a wealthy family, there’s no inheritance for him in England, but he gets his remittance, so there is no urgency for him to find an answer.  He lingers at the boarding house he first lands at until a new friend convinces him to go west with him, then, when farming doesn’t do it for him, he continues to Vancouver, until finally he finds himself on a small, wooded island (that seems familiar to those who’ve read The Glass Hotel).  While wandering through the woods, he experiences an inexplicable break in time that leaves him confused, disoriented, and very sick to his stomach. 

It is something other characters experience, in other times, including folks from The Glass Hotel, and Olive, a novelist from one of the moon colonies (located by the Sea of Tranquility), who is traveling Earth in 2203 as part of her book tour regarding her novel about a post-pandemic world, unknowingly just as Earth (and its lunar colonies) are on the brink of an actual pandemic. And then there’s Gaspery, a man who seems to be everywhere and everywhen, and constantly grappling with the question of what’s real and how we can know. 

I enjoyed the thematic similarities between this and To Paradise. There are loose connections from century to century.  There’s a great deal of flexibility with time and universes, particularly with versions of the folks we met in The Glass Hotel reappear here. I couldn’t tell you if this is supposed to be the exact same time and place, or if we’re in a slightly alternate reality, but it really doesn’t matter in terms of enjoying it.  If you haven’t read The Glass Hotel, don’t feel like you must before reading this one.  The story works even with no background knowledge.  But if you have, it’s a fun little reunion.  And once again, a pandemic is central to part of the tale, with Olive’s experiences elegantly calling back to the early days of the Covid shut down. The earlier chapters also all take place just a few years before a pandemic will sweep the globe (the 1918 influenza for Edwin, Covid-19 for Miranda and our near-present-day characters).

Like Plato’s Cave, Sea of Tranquility prods us to question what we see and experience around us.  Or as we phrase it these days, are we all simply existing in a simulation?  Should we all periodically be whispering “Computer, end program,” to make sure we aren’t stuck in some sort of holodeck malfunction in a Star Trek: TNG episode?  What if we start finding evidence we are in a simulation?  How would (or should?) it change how we live? 

As Olive’s world shrinks to a couple of rooms, she continues to give her lectures on why postapocalyptic literature is so popular, now through whatever the future’s version of Zoom may be. And her theory resonated with me:

My point is, there’s always something.  I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story.  It’s a kind of narcissism.  We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now, is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.

And yet, we continue on.  As dark and as hopeless as things may seem, there is still time for us to find a new way, to grapple with our unknowns, to find solace and comfort in one another, to pull the drowning out of the water.

Find it online:

Bookshop.org

Amazon

Book Review: To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

/ Denise / 2 Comments
Cover of the book To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

I noticed recently that I haven’t read as many books as usual by this time of year. Then I realized that Almanac of the Dead and today’s book, To Paradise, felt like reading multiple books in one. This is especially true of To Paradise, which is comprised of three distinct stories that share a loose common bond. The book is divided into three parts, each of which could be a book on its own. The core setting remains the same: New York City, specifically, a large house in Washington Square, with each story set 100 years after the previous (1893, 1993, and 2093). The names of the characters also pass through each of these years, which creates an interesting set of questions for the reader: how is this David different from that David? How do I feel about this Charles, knowing what I know about the other ones? That age-old question of “what’s in a name” creates an undercurrent that swirls through the entire work without overwhelming it. 

Washington Square

Set in an alternate history version of New York City in 1893, the first segment of the book (“Washington Square”) focuses on 23-year-old David Bingham. Here, the Civil War did not end in a reunion of the Union, but rather additional splintering. The South remains ceded, reconstituted as “The United Colonies.” The northern-central/Midwestern part of the U.S. is now called “America” or “The American Union.” The West Coast is the Western Union, the Southwest (excluding Texas) is labeled on the map as simply “Uncharted Territory,” Maine is its own Republic, and the rest of the Northeast, including New York, make up “The Free States.” In the Free States, homosexuality is not only legal, but same-sex marriages are commonplace (and so are arranged marriages, complete with marriage brokers) and relatively unremarkable.

David lives in the Washington Square house with his grandfather, the only unmarried and aimless drifter of his siblings. While Free State society has a very open-minded view of homosexuality, it still maintains the usual biases against mental illness, class differences, and race. Free Staters pity Black people from the Colonies for the terrible plight in which they find themselves in the South and the affluent join aid societies aimed at helping them escape, but only to push them out to America or Canada or anywhere else. As a wealthy White man, destined to inherit even more from his famous banking scion grandfather, David is in a position of great respect and power, but his troubling “nervous issues” that occasionally send him into a catatonic state is a secret that needs to be covered as much as possible. 

David’s grandfather, Nathaniel, however, has found a suitable suitor for David, a gentleman from Massachusetts named Charles. A widower, Charles is a kind and dependable man, with a fortune of his own. But then a poor but beautiful and gifted music teacher named Edward catches David’s eye – and heart. Soon David finds himself in a common romantic dilemma: does he stay with the “safe” and practical choice expected of someone of his status or does he give it all up for romance and passion, despite potential red flags? What does it mean to be free? How will he get to paradise?

Lipo-wao-nahele

We leave David’s struggle over his future to jump to 1993, where another David Bingham is confronting his past. This David is a young paralegal in a relationship with one of the big-shot attorneys at the firm, named Charles. Charles is wealthy, living in the same Washington Square house, self-confident and assured. He handles everything, makes all the decisions, and wants David to just be with him and enjoy the comforts he can provide. David tells himself this is ideal, but under the surface, things feel off.

When we meet him, David is preparing for the huge dinner party Charles is throwing for a dying friend.  Death and illness seem to be everywhere, as a disease stalks gay men, striking silently and causing them to waste away. (While never named, it’s clear she’s talking about AIDS.) David observes how Charles’ friends have their own ways of dealing with this ever-present threat, including those who seem to have turned gluttonous, as though by gaining weight they could block the disease while simultaneously proving to everyone around them that they were not sick. 

But all of this suddenly takes second billing when David receives an unexpected letter from home.  David, we learn, is originally from Hawaii and through his father’s side, a direct descendant of Hawaiian royalty. If it hadn’t been for the colonization of Hawaii and the deposing of its queen back in 1898, David could very well have been preparing to take the throne, instead of living royally through his boyfriend.  Something fractured in his childhood, though, driving him to start another life on the other side of the continent. There was some sort of falling out between him and his father, a sickness of a kind that his father couldn’t overcome. 

This section is told in two different formats – one from David’s perspective in the present and his father’s perspective of his past through a letter. Through the letter, we learn of David’s father’s childhood, his meeting of the independence-focused Edward, his brief relationship with David’s mother, his love for David, and his inability to stand up for himself against those who would use him to push their own dreams of Hawaiian independence. Meanwhile, David must figure out if he is ok being swept along in Charles’ wake or if he is following the same path as his father. 

Zone Eight

The letter style continues in the third part of the book.  We begin in 2093 where we meet Charlie, granddaughter of a scientist/virologist also named Charles. Charlie grew up in the house on Washington Square with her grandfather, but only in a small apartment. The house has been divided up over the years and is only for married people. Charlie recently married, and her grandfather moved out, hoping he had done everything possible to protect her. New York is a much more dangerous and depressing place then it ever was in the previous centuries. 

As we learn in greater details through Charles’ letters, which begin in the 2040s, Earth is now continually plagued by pandemic after pandemic, despite scientists’ bests efforts to stay ahead. Some were more virulent than others – Charlie barely survived the pandemic of the 2070s that took so many children. The treatment that saved her life left her changed, erasing her original personality and causing her to struggle with human interactions. 

In addition to the waves of deadly illnesses, climate change has ravaged the planet as well. The government controls Central Park, and set up the Farm, where Charlie’s husband works, to try to genetically engineer plants and animals that could help increase the food supply and/or work as medicines. Nearly all civil rights are suspended – Charlie is left shaking and terrified each time their apartment is searched by authorities.  The internet is long gone – it was, as Charles explained in his letters, too big a source of disinformation that led to people dying. Mass crematoriums are set up on Roosevelt Island to keep up with the dead.  And yet, even with this large-scale horror show, Charlie continues with her daily life, using her ration book to get her allotments of food, wondering if her husband will ever love her, taking care of the embryonic rats at the lab. Despite the horror of everything, life moves along. Until it doesn’t.

Overall, I liked this book.  It was a bit confusing at first with all the names overlapping across the centuries, but I liked the implications of it. So much of this story revolves around questions of fate, destiny, free will, and the cumulative effects of our choices. Despite its length, it never felt long, perhaps helped by the fact that it has such discrete parts. And each part struck different chords in me. The Washington Square book recreates a sense of Victorian novels, diving into the world of the wealthy elite, the duty to one’s class, and the difficulties that can create for love.  Parts of Lipo-wao-nahele reminded me of And The Band Played On, a foundational work on the AIDS crisis, while the scenes from Hawai’i recalled Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn, about a Hawai’ian family dealing with the pulls of tradition, family responsibility, and finding one’s own path. 

Zone Eight, though, simply reminded me of now.  While published in 2022, apparently Yanagihara wrote much of the Zone Eight section before 2020 and the outbreak of Covid.  She did her work though, spending a great deal of time researching viruses and pandemics, interviewing scientists and researchers and figuring out how things might play out with a new virus sweeping across the globe.  Regardless of when she wrote it, she captured so much of the tensions we currently face. 

Generally speaking, when I read dystopian novels, I quickly and easily side with those fighting their oppressors. It’s usually clear-cut, though things rarely are in real life. Charles’ letters force us to see how well-meaning choices can spiral out of control. At one point, Charles tells his family it’s understandable to sympathize with a mother who smuggled her sick child out of the hospital and took him back to her apartment building, where she desperately tried to get someone to help her. He then urged them to think about how many innocent people she exposed to a deadly disease, how many of her elderly neighbors and other children paid the price of her fear – were they not deserving of sympathy? What of the families they left behind? Having lived through this pandemic, those arguments don’t feel so theoretical. But where do the lines get drawn? 

Questions are the foundation of this book. Yanagihara isn’t going to provide answers. But perhaps it is the asking of questions that leads to paradise.  

Thoughts on To Paradise? Did you have a favorite of the three parts? How do you feel reading fictional accounts of plagues and pandemics these days? Leave a comment and start a discussion!

Places you can buy online:

Bookshop.org

Amazon.com

Book Review: Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko

/ Denise / 6 Comments
Cover of the book Almanac of the Dead on a table with a white background and pottery behind it.

You should read this book. 

I’m starting with that, because in a minute, I’m going to start listing all the things that make this a difficult book to read and it may sound like I’m encouraging you to ignore it.  I am most definitely not.  But you should be prepared for what you’re getting. 

First and foremost, it’s almost impossible to find a traditional “good guy,” despite the seemingly endless list of characters you meet.  Silko is putting all of humanity’s worst traits on display.  I don’t know if I can even remember all of the potential trigger/content warnings that should be included, but for starters, there’s sexual assault/violence, physical abuse, emotional abuse, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, suicide, sadism, torture, and so on.  In short, this book is an indictment.  Specifically, it is an indictment of 500 years of European/European American colonialism and genocide and the unwillingness of society to recognize those crimes and address their fallout.  As such, those sins continue to rot and fester and spread to everyone.  (Have I sold you on this book yet?)

The overarching story is the efforts of a wide range of Native American characters to fight back against the injustices of a history of Euro-American conquest and those that stand in their way.  The list of characters is, in a word, long, so I won’t even try to go through each of them.  The book is divided into different parts, each introduced tied to a specific geography. Within each, a few chapters are dedicated to one set of characters, which then rolls into a completely different set, which in turn moves to a different location and a different group of people.  But everything cycles back together.  There are sets of twins who each have their own part to play in the fight to retake the lands stolen from them.  Elderly twin sisters Lecha and Zeta serve as an anchor.  From their estate in the Tucson area, they have returned to work on the titular Almanac of the Dead, a collection of pages passed down through generations, marking their history of their tribe (namely the Yaqui), surviving the death and destruction that literally chased the first carriers of these words.  Enduring the ravages of time and the attacks on memory, the book survives, edited and annotated and added to by new guardians until finally it is time for the twins to put it all together.  Living with them are Lecha’s grown son Ferro, a drug runner whom she left when he was a baby for her sister to raise; Sterling, a Laguna Indian who was exiled from his tribe and who is fascinated by Tucson’s gangster history and the story of Geronimo; Seese, a White, drug-addicted woman whose infant son was kidnapped and who hopes that Lecha’s psychic abilities will help her find him; and Paulie, who raises the guard dogs and is one of Ferror’s lovers.  And that’s just one group.  There are flashbacks and side stories and parentheticals, but like the tributaries of a river, the waters eventually all rejoin to flow to the sea.

Silko does a superb job of erasing the artificial boundaries erected between countries.  The border between the U.S. and Mexico matters only inasmuch characters have to deal with the hassle of border guards, but it is very clear that this means nothing to the descendants of those who freely lived in these areas and who had no say in the drawing of lines on maps.  The land itself is an essential part of the stories, and how people treat the land tells us something about them as well. There were several passages I saved because something caught my eye, such as this, where one of the characters we meet in Mexico recalls his Indian grandfather:

“The old man had been interested in what the Europeans thought and the names they had for the planets and stars. He thought the stories accounting for the sun and the planets were interesting only because their stories of explosions and flying fragments were consistent with everything else he had seen: from their flimsy attachments to each other and their children to their abandonment of the land where they had been born. He thought about what the ancestors had called Europeans: their God had created them but soon was furious with them, throwing them out of their birthplace, driving them away. The ancestors had called Europeans ‘the orphan people’ and had noted that as with orphans taken in by selfish or coldhearted clanspeople, few Europeans had remained whole. They failed to recognize the earth was their mother. Europeans were like their first parents, Adam and Eve, wandering aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them.”

Through it all, Silko reminds of historical events (the Haitian Revolution, the Mexican Emperor Maximilian and his wife Charlotte, the dirty wars of the Cold War era, etc.), the prophecies of various indigenous peoples, observations of Europeans and their descendants, and more.  This grand scope storytelling is expertly interwoven with the deeply personal and individual stories of each character, and reminds us of the cyclical nature of life and history.  Buried deep within this exposé of darkness and evil and rot is a note of hope, that eventually history will right itself.  The question is how much suffering must happen before then. 

This was a hard review to write and I don’t feel like I’ve done it justice.  There’s so much to discuss, but no simple way to do so.  I’ve seen academic articles and dissertations devoted exclusively to this book, and that seems about the level of writing I’d have to do if I wanted to fully break this down.  Published in 1992, it resonates today as we slowly, slowly, slowly and haltingly start trying to address our past.  Changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day is only a micro baby step.  To really engage and reckon with our history, our present, and our future, it’ll be uncomfortable.  There’s anger.  And while there’s a vocal segment of society that feels like anything that makes (white) people uncomfortable should be banned, ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.  To quote from the source: “History would catch up with the white man whether the Indians did anything or not.  History was the sacred text.  The most complete history was the most powerful force.”

You should read this book.

Have you read The Almanac of the Dead? What did you think of it? Did you struggle to get through it? Did it stick with you afterwards? Share your views in the comments!

Places you can buy online:

Bookshop.org

Amazon.com