Dread Nation Review

  OH. MY. GAWD! Okay, so if you guys haven't heard about this book, I'm going to give your post-rock self a fairly new book that you are going to want to pick up ASAP. Truth be told I have no idea what the genre of this book is, it's historical fiction, but I feel like it's more revisionist historical fiction, but then there are dystopian aspects to it because there are ZOMBIES, or shamblers as they call them in the book, but holy shit you will love this book. Also, I wrote this in September (?) so this maybe a bit old.

   So this book is about Miss Jane McKeene who is one of the students at Miss Preston's School of Combat in Baltimore. It takes place during "post-war" Civil War, although technically the Civil War was never finished it was... put on hiatus because zombies take priority over the Union and the Confederacy. In this alternate universe, as opposed to being slaves, African Americans are sent to combat schools to be taught how to fight the Shamblers as a part of the Negro Reeducation Act. Jane's main goal is to finish school and go back home to her mother in Kentucky, but after being swept into a series of corruption, Jane and her classmate Katherine, are sent to a resettlement that claims to be a utopia. I have never really read anything like this; I guess you have alternate universe historical fictions out there (like Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin where the book takes place in a world where the Nazis won) and there are a few historical fictions that take place during the Civil War, but to combine the two aspects together with zombies is just a completely unique idea. Also, I have to applaud Justina Ireland for being able to include an asexual character as well as a bisexual character into the book without it being their whole character development. While there is a possibility that this was just thrown in to be "woke," this is the first book in a series (so far there's only one other book confirmed for the series) and there's definitely a possibility for Ireland  to develop this more, but since this book is more plot based, I feel the second book will be more character-based, so I highly doubt that this will just be a throwaway characterization.




 The one problem I had, and it isn't really a problem, is that I couldn't really understand how Katherine could appear white enough in Summerland, but was sent to the combat school. I could have missed this detail because I read probably the first half at 4 in the morning, and maybe I'm thinking how the Holocaust was, where if you were 1/ 16th Jewish, you were considered Jewish and I think the Nazis erred on the side of caution. This was maybe a detail that Ireland overlooked for the sake of the plot or maybe I missed something, but it did confuse me.

  All in all, I gave this book a 5 out of 5 stars and I would absolutely recommend this book!