Trail of Lightening by Rebecca Roanhorse

[watervole]

 This is a well-written book with some interesting world-building, but it ultimately failed to grab me.

 

After a global disaster referred to as the Big Water, vast swathes of the globe are covered in water.  One of the surviving regions is Dine Navaho Indian territory.  Here, the old legends have returned, the tales once told by Elders are now desperately researched in an effort to understand what is happening. 

Clan powers can re-emerge giving some people extraordinary abilities - but these are not supermen/women, use of these abilities is for a short duration and drains a lot of energy.

 

Characters like Coyote the Trickster are now real and interfering in the lives of ordinary people for their own amusement.

 

Maggie, the protagonist, had a harrowing experience as a teenager, which awakened her clan power - she's a natural killer.  Which makes her unpopular, but necessary, as there are monsters out there that eat people.

 

There's a lot of good stuff in this book, but I found I didn't really relate to either of the main characters, and there were a few points in the plot where I bounced right off it. 

 

 

eg. Why did Maggie believe that Neizghání was the witch they sought - because regardless of a few bits of planted evidence, it was so obviously ridiculous?)  Why did Longarm try to kill Kai?  Can you really get a car to run on whisky for fuel, and if you can, how can she drive so far on so little whisky?

Comments

[eledonecirrhosa]

You can convert cars to run on alcohol - Brazil has done it big time. But you want it to be fairly pure, not have much water content and not be full of the things that make alcoholic drinks taste good. So it would have to be such a high proof that a teaspoonful of it would render a drinker utterly plastered, if not suffering from acute alcohol poisoning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil

Alcohol isn't as energy dense as petrol, so you get less miles to the gallon.

[watervole]

Ethanol would make a lot more sense.
Maggie is definitely using actual whisky. She drinks it occasionally.

[ranunculus]

I know that Rebecca Roanhorse is supposed to be a good writer. When I began one of her books I found the first chapters so dark and awful that I just quit reading. I've never been terribly attracted to apocalyptic fiction in the first place.

[watervole]

Not my favourite genre either. I tried it because it was a Hugo nominee a few years ago, but I'm not sure it really lived upto that expectation.

[vera_j]

Yes, as for the dystopia stuff, I am not very eager to read such things. However I have alaways been attracted to Native Americans...Never mind. I will never read the book. Thank you for your review!