Dread Nation by Justina Ireland
Review by Anar M., Youth Reviewer
Historical fiction is a typical genre. So is horror, and especially zombies. “Dread Nation” is the first book I’ve read that combines the two.
In Justina Ireland’s alternate world, the battle of Gettysburg went differently: partway through, the dead rose up and attacked the living. Sixteen years on, Black and Indigenous people are trained to fight the walking dead (often called “shamblers”) and protect the whites in what remains of the US — mostly cities in the east, which the government has recently declared shambler-free.
Jane McKeene is the Black daughter of the mistress of Rose Hill — her mother is white-passing and pretending to be fully white, but Jane is Black. At fourteen, she is taken from Rose Hill and enters a training school to become a white lady’s Attendant, although she plans to return home to Rose Hill after graduating. Her plan is complicated by the disappearance of several families in the area, and rising political tensions between the Survivalists (who want to recreate pre-Civil War America, complete with slavery and no shamblers) and Egalitarians (the minority, who believe in racial equality).
Slavery has been abolished in Ireland’s alternate America, but Blacks and Indigenous people are definitely still a lower class. This America isn’t undergoing a Reconstruction. A common (Survivalist) political standpoint is that the dead rose up on the fields of Gettysburg as a punishment because Lincoln disrupted the “natural order” by abolishing slavery. Ireland’s depiction of the rampant racism of the times is startlingly vivid.
An interesting theme of the book is violence. Jane has been killing shamblers for years; they need to be decapitated to keep them dead, and killing them is a bloody, gory business. The trick, Jane tells us, is not to think of them as people. But Jane’s killed human beings, too: at age nine, she shot her mother’s husband, the owner of Rose Hill, when he returned from a long absence and threatened the peace and safety her mother had created. For most of the book, the reader understands that he was a shambler — but we learn in the last pages that he was alive and well when she killed him. Jane kills other male antagonists, too, and I suspect that the guilt she refuses to acknowledge will be a significant theme in book two.
Find “Dread Nation” at Kitchener Public Library!