Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World, #1) in SOS: Serious Overload of Series

Jul 26, 2018 Monadh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: uf, dystopia, anti-hero, magic, native-american

Uniquely imaginative UF tale, that seamlessly blends Western rationality with Navajo mythology

There is no dearth of Urban Fantasy series featuring Native American heroines, on the contrary, they seem quite ubiquitous. There is Mercy Thompson, herself the daughter of Coyote, Jane Yellowrock, the skinwalker, Janet Begay (Stormwalker), daughter of a Goddess, just to name a few. But as far as I know this is the first UF series written by a (female) Native American author.

I am a bit surprised that no Uniquely imaginative UF tale, that seamlessly blends Western rationality with Navajo mythology

There is no dearth of Urban Fantasy series featuring Native American heroines, on the contrary, they seem quite ubiquitous. There is Mercy Thompson, herself the daughter of Coyote, Jane Yellowrock, the skinwalker, Janet Begay (Stormwalker), daughter of a Goddess, just to name a few. But as far as I know this is the first UF series written by a (female) Native American author.

I am a bit surprised that nobody has remarked on the title before, because my first association was with “Trail of Tears”. Trail of Tears refers to the forced removal of Native American peoples from their ancestral homelands in the Southwestern US in the wake of the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Navajo forced removal took place in 1864 and is usually referred to as “The Long Walk”. The Navajo displacement is special in the regard that they were later (in 1868) “allowed” to return to their ancestral lands inside of their four sacred mountains. So with “Trail of Tears” I associate the forced removal of Native Peoples in particular, and in a more general context other policies by the US government aimed to destroy Native American culture. For me this was one of the strong subtexts of the book.

Another important context that frames this book is ecocriticism. It examines and contrasts Native American and White notions of nature and space. The post-apocalyptic world that Roanhouse creates is rooted in our present, where man-made climate-change will invariable end in the “Big Water” that has rendered large parts of the US uninhabitable. In an ironic twist the tribal council of the Diné then decided to build a wall on all four side of their territory (reservation), a wall that at 50 feet exceeds the proposed height of Trump’s wall of 30 feet bigly. The land is barren, resources like water and fuel are scarce and coffee and sugar have become luxury goods.

Trail of Lightning is the first book in The Sixth World series and above everything else, it’s a really outstanding, uniquely imaginative UF tale, that seamlessly blends Western rationality with Navajo mythology. It has nuanced, multidimensional, sometimes a bit contradictory characters whose traits slowly unfold over the course of the book. The phantastical creatures that inhabit its pages are not of the common garden variety of vampires, werewolves and the like, but are rooted in Navajo mythology. The juxtaposition of an almost mundane realism with more holistic traditional Native beliefs imbues it with a feeling of magic realism. Throughout the book the lines between scientific/rational explanations and the phantastical/magical are repeatedly questioned and blurred (for example in the portrayal of Kai’s powers of which Maggie – and with her the reader – is quite skeptical). We as readers are seduced into reflecting Navajo ontology and thereby forced to critically question our own world view, maybe without really realizing it…

The ending is not a cliffhanger precisely, but nonetheless I wanted to throw the book at the wall, and I would have if it had been a paperback instead of my Kindle, because we are left hanging with regards to Kai’s fate (who is the main male protagonist, the hero, or rather the anti-hero). Luckily there is a preview of the next book at the end and the most important question get’s answered there. But to find out more we will have to wait until Spring 2019, when the next installment, Storm of Locusts, is set to be released…
...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Mar 24, 2019 Mashara rated it really liked it

Fans of Kate Daniels will find a kindred spirit in Maggie.
She's tough and she's been hurt beyond breaking point and she's trying to crawl her way back to being a human being.
On top of that the world building and character development is fantastic and a great intro to the Navajo world after an apocalyptic event.
I've already pre order the next book. ...more

1 like · Like · see review