This last flood, the one you call the Big Water, ended the Fifth World and began the Sixth. It opened the passage for those like myself to return to the world.
The climate disaster that left a lot of the world underwater also left the Navajo reservation mostly untouched. Not that the Dinétah is an easy place to live. It’s bad enough to be cut off from supply lines and suffering from the worst drought in decades, but the flooding of the world also triggered a rebirth of the Diné. There are now gods, monsters, and heroes roaming the land, and young monsterhunter Maggie Hoskie is fed up with all three.
Maggie would like nothing better than to lock herself away in her trailer, mourning the loss of the rescuer and mentor who abandoned her a year ago. Unfortunately for her, someone in the Dinétah is creating new monsters, and the Trickster God himself is interfering with the hunt.
Click the jump for a review of Rebecca Roanhorse’s debut novel, which also happens to be up for a Hugo award for Best Novel!
The story takes place in a near-future post apocalyptic world, but don’t expect any futuristic technology or settings. The most high-tech items you’ll see are a cobbled together wrist-mounted flame-thrower and a 1972 Chevy 4×4 pickup that’s been converted to run on whiskey. And even though the Navajo are living behind a supernaturally created wall that keeps out the rest of the world, the Dinétah isn’t some kind of stereotypical Native American paradise with everyone living in harmony with nature.
What you have here is an urban fantasy that’s much deeper, grittier, more complex than that. The Navajo have a rich history, with their own unique culture, clan and family ties, and religion, and the characters here reflect that. They’re also understandably wary of outsiders after centuries of abuse by other races, and they’re living in sun-baked cities that haven’t changed much since the flooding of the world. Most of all they’re just people, perfectly capable of being warm and welcoming, or cruel, or hurting and willing to lash out at anyone they think might be to blame, especially if they’re someone like Maggie who can be really hard to like.
And now they are looking to me to be their hero.
But I’m no hero. I’m more of a last resort, a scorched-earth policy. I’m the person you hire when the heroes have already come home in body bags.
Magdalena Hoskie, Honághááhnii born for K’aahanáanii, is in many ways an iron-cold bitch. Or at least that’s how she treats people. We learn her history in brief flashbacks throughout the book, and she’s gone through enough trauma and abandonment that the only logical way for her to walk through the world is to be as prickly 
and withdrawn as possible. She has magical “clan powers” (more on those later), and she’s been trained by the greatest monsterhunter in Diné legend. And yet she automatically assumes her gifts are a curse, and that she’s poison for anyone who gets too close, most especially Kai Arviso, the handsome and charming man her grandfatherly friend Tah is determined to set her up with.
The Strong-But-Damaged-Woman-Who-Doesn’t-Think-She-Deserves-To-Be-Loved is an incredibly common trope (there’s even a scene where Maggie has a makeover in order to infiltrate a nightclub, and everyone but her can see How Beautiful She Really Is) and we have the standard will-they-or-won’t-they attraction between herself and Kai. But the fact that Maggie is almost an archetype somehow made it easier for me to stay in the story when Coyote himself appears on the scene in a flash of lightning and the clothes of an Old West dandy.
I’ve seen many, many different interpretations of the Native American Trickster God. Some of them show Coyote as a master manipulator, some are closer to a well-meaning prankster, others are more like Wile E. Coyote who’s too clever for his own good and keeps getting himself into trouble with overly-complicated plots. Roanhorse’s Coyote (or Ma’ai) is probably the scariest version of Coyote I’ve seen; he loves poking at people’s hidden pain, and he has a very unpredictable temper.
For a moment the pretense of the Western Gentleman falters and I glimpse his true form under the facade.
Along with the immortal Trickster, the book is filled with supernatural elements like Clan Powers (ancestral gifts like speed or fighting ability), weather magic, feathered talismans, and charmed shotgun shells filled with obsidian and corn pollen. An especially fun scene happens when Maggie and Kai enter an underground nightclub after using a special paint that lets them see through illusions. Everyone at the club appears as animal-human hybrids as their clan affiliations shine through their skin.
Many of the clans I recognize. Ats’oos Dine’é, the Feather People, are easy to spot, their feathered bodies covered in the grays, browns, and whites of hawks. Others have more elaborate plumage, showing reds and yellows and blues. All have a third eyelid that moves horizontally across staring eyes.
The plot takes a little while to get going, Maggie spends a lot of time being told where to go rather than acting on her own, and there were times when I wished that I knew more about Navajo legends so that the reveal of someone’s Clan Powers would feel more natural and less like a plot-convenience. And it becomes very clear that this tale of violence and betrayal is not supposed to be a stand-alone book, so the ending is a little abrupt and leave a lot of unanswered questions. Book two of this series is already out and it promises to have a few more answers, plus a bigger glimpse of the wider world and more dazzling fight scenes using lightning and knives.