Nettie Lonesome lives in a land of hard people and hard ground dusted with sand. She’s a half-breed who dresses like a boy, raised by folks who don’t call her a slave but use her like one. She knows of nothing else. That is, until the day a stranger attacks her. When nothing, not even a sickle to the eye can stop him, Nettie stabs him through the heart with a chunk of wood and he turns to black sand.

 

And just like that, Nettie can see.

 

But her newfound sight is a blessing and a curse. Even if she doesn’t understand what’s under her own skin, she can sense what everyone else is hiding—at least physically. The world is full of evil, and now she knows the source of all the sand in the desert. Haunted by the spirits, Nettie has no choice but to set out on a quest that might lead her to find her true kin . . . if the monsters along the way don’t kill her first.

Well, I didn’t set out to read two books in a row by authors who have written some incredible stuff in the Star Wars universe, but…here we are.

Delilah S. Dawson/Lila Bowen wrote a digital-only Star Wars short story called “The Perfect Weapon”. It was released shortly before The Force Awakens, at which point I was mainlining EVERYTHING Star Wars that I could get my hands on. And it was a fucking radical short story. Flash forward to 2017, and Dawson wrote “Phasma”, arguably one of the best novels in the new Star Wars canon. It’s got a Mad Max: Fury Road vibe, and gives so much respect and fascinating backstory to a character who has been criminally underused in the films.

I’ve had Wake of Vultures on my shelf for way too long now, and I’m just so fucking glad to have finally started this series. This book kicks all kinds of ass.

This is the story of Nettie Lonesome, a half-Black half-Indian girl living in a town called Gloomy Bluebird, in the Durango territory (this book takes place in an alternate America). She was abandoned as an infant, and has been raised by Pap and Mam. They are horrible to her, and she’s been treated essentially as a slave for her entire life.

But everything about Nettie’s life is about to change.

One night, she is attacked by a stranger in the barn. And Nettie fights back, hard. In the course of this fight, she manages to stake the guy in the heart. Whereupon he turns to dust. Poof. So that’s weird, no?

With a bit of rare good fortune on her side, Nettie soon manages to get a job at the Double TK Ranch, breaking horses. Nettie has a gift with horses, and a gentle way of taming the wild ones. She’s delighted to be doing what she loves, and to be free of Pap & Mam’s mistreatments. But that encounter with the stranger in the barn has changed her in ways she can’t even begin to understand.

Now that she’s killed a monster (he was a vampire, after all), she can see monsters everywhere. Vampires, shapeshifters, werewolves, chupacabras, you name it…shit, there’s even a unicorn in this book! Nettie meets a shapeshifter named Coyote Dan, and he almost becomes her guide to this new world that’s opening up before her. She’s put on a path to hunt down a vicious monster known as the Cannibal Owl, which has been on a murderous rampage of late.

Wake of Vultures is almost like an origin story in some ways…it’s very definitely a Book One. Nettie is trying to make sense of not just the world as she now sees it, but she’s also really trying to figure herself out in the process. She spends a lot of her time passing herself off as a man, not just because it makes things easier for her in this time period, but because she sort of identifies that way. Her sexuality is also something that’s rather fluid. Basically her philosophy seems to boil down beautifully to just….be whoever you want to be, and love whoever you want to love.

I’m not sure how you would classify this book (if you wanted to)….probably a Weird Western if push came to shove. It’s undoubtedly a Western…I mean, the characters ride horses, chew tobacco, pack six-shooters, and say “reckon” and “ain’t” an awful lot. So, yeah…it’s a Western, and a really fucking good one at that.

I just loved this so much. The dialogue crackles & the writing is outstanding. Nettie is a thoroughly engaging main character…she’s hot-tempered, foul-mouthed, and all heart. There’s all kinds of crazy shit happening in this world, and I’m very excited to be along for the ride!

*adds the next three books to Amazon cart*