Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

 

This was a buddy-read with my friend, Deidra @ ShadeTreeReads, so make sure you check out her review, too!

I've been anticipating this one for a while because I heard it was good for people who like the Kate Daniels series and it is a post-apocalyptic urban fantasy that puts emphasis on Navajo/Dine culture.

The good:

The writing is very clean. The world-building, once I figured it out, is unique among its peers (although that isn't really a "positive," since, you know,: more rep of different cultures in UF would be nice). I thought the climate change event that triggered the undoing of life as we formerly knew it was interesting and love that the story revolves mostly around other Native American people. The heroine is a bad-ass who takes no prisoners and has cool powers and a scary knife.

The bad:

I feel like I spent huge swaths of this book waiting for Something to happen. And while that's the only bad, it was the main thing driving the story (or preventing the driving of the story), so it ended up impacting my enjoyment of the book a lot. Some people seem to enjoy the experience of just being immersed in something different, and if that's enough for you, you might like this. But by the time I finished, I kind of felt like the Kate Daniels comparisons might end up doing this book more harm than good because it really doesn't have the same pacing and the setting is totally different. KD is much more urban-centric (big cities, underground tunnels, etc.) whereas this one feels more like a remote Western. So apart from snarky first person female narrator, they really aren't so similar.

2 out of 5 stars