Review: Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Tue Aug 20 20:29:47 PDT 2019


Trail of Lightning
by Rebecca Roanhorse

Series:    The Sixth World #1
Publisher: Saga
Copyright: 2018
ISBN:      1-5344-1351-0
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     286

Maggie Hoskie is a monster hunter. Trained and then inexplicably
abandoned by Neizghání, an immortal monster-slayer of her people, the
Diné (Navajo), she's convinced that she's half-monster herself. Given
that she's the sort of monster hunter who also kills victims that she
thinks may be turned into monsters themselves, she may have a point.
Apart from contracts to kill things, she stays away from nearly
everyone except Tah, a medicine man and nearly her only friend.

The monster that she kills at the start of the book is a sign of a
larger problem. Tah says that it was created by someone else using
witchcraft. Maggie isn't thrilled at the idea of going after the
creator alone, given that witchcraft is what Neizghání rescued her from
in an event that takes Maggie most of the book to be willing to
describe. Tah's solution is a partner: Tah's grandson Kai, a handsome
man with a gift for persuasion who has never hunted a monster before.

If you've read any urban fantasy, you have a pretty good idea of where
the story goes from there, and that's a problem. The hair-trigger,
haunted kick-ass woman with a dark past, the rising threat of monsters,
the protagonist's fear that she's a monster herself, and the growing
romance with someone who will accept her is old, old territory. I've
read versions of this from Laurell K. Hamilton twenty-five years ago to
S.L. Huang's ongoing Cas Russell series. To stand out in this very
crowded field, a series needs some new twist. Roanhorse's is the deep
grounding in Native American culture and mythology. It worked well
enough for many people to make it a Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy
nominee. It didn't work for me.

I partly blame a throw-away line in Mike Kowlowski's review of this
book for getting my hopes up. He said in a parenthetical note that "the
book is set in Dinétah, a Navajo nation post-apocalyptically
resurgent." That sounded great to me; I'd love to read about what sort
of society the Diné might build if given the opportunity following an
environmental collapse. Unfortunately, there's nothing resurgent about
Maggie's community or people in this book. They seem just as poor and
nearly as screwed as they are in our world; everyone else has just been
knocked down even farther (or killed) and is kept at bay by magical
walls. There's no rebuilding of civilization here, just isolated
settlements desperate for water, plagued by local warlords and gangs,
and facing the added misery of supernatural threats. It's bleak, cruel,
and unremittingly hot, which does not make for enjoyable reading.

What Roanhorse does do is make extensive use of Native American
mythology to shape the magic system, creatures, and supernatural world
view of the book. This is great. We need a wider variety of magic
systems in fantasy, and drawing on mythological systems other than
Celtic, Greek, Roman, and Norse is a good start. (Roanhorse herself is
Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, not Navajo, but I assume without any personal
knowledge that her research here is reasonably good.) But, that said,
the way the mythology plays out in this book didn't work for me. It
felt scattered and disconnected, and therefore arbitrary.

Some of the difficulty here is inherent in the combination of my
unfamiliarity and the challenge of adopting real-world mythological
systems for stories. As an SFF reader, one of the things I like from
the world-building is structure. I like seeing how the pieces of the
magical system fit together to build a coherent set of rules, and how
the protagonists manipulate those rules in the story. Real-world
traditions are rarely that neat and tidy. If the reader is already
familiar with the tradition, they can fill in a lot of the untold back
story that makes the mythology feel more coherent. If the author cannot
assume that knowledge, they can get stuck between simplifying and
restructuring the mythology for easy understanding or showing only
scattered and apparently incoherent pieces of a vast system. I think
the complaints about the distorted and simplified version of Celtic
mythology in a lot of fantasy novels from those familiar with the real
thing is the flip-side to this problem; it's worse mythology, but it
may be more approachable storytelling.

I'm sure it didn't help that one of the most important mythological
figures of this book is Coyote, a trickster god. I have great
intellectual appreciation for the role of trickster gods in
mythological systems, but this is yet more evidence that I rarely get
along with them in stories. Coyote in this story is less of an
unreliable friend and more of a straight-up asshole who was not fun to
read about.

That brings me to my largest complaint about this novel: I liked
exactly one person in the entire story. Grace, the fortified bar owner,
is great and I would have happily read a book about her. Everyone else,
including Maggie, ranged from irritating to unbearably obnoxious. I was
saying the eight deadly words ("I don't care what happens to these
people") by page 100.

Here, tastes will differ. Maggie acts the way that she does because
she's sitting on a powder keg of unprocessed emotional injury from
abuse, made far worse by Neizghání's supposed "friendship." It's
realistic that she shuts down, refuses to have meaningful
conversations, and lashes out at everyone on a hair trigger. I felt
sympathy, but I didn't like her, and liking her is important when the
book is written in very immediate present-tense first person. Kai is
better, but he's a bit too much of a stereotype, and I have an aversion
to supposedly-charming men. I think some of the other characters could
have been good if given enough space (Tah, for instance), but Maggie's
endless loop of self-hatred doesn't give them any room to breathe.

Add on what I thought were structural and mechanical flaws (the
first-person narration is weirdly specific and detail-oriented in a way
that felt like first-novel mechanical problems, and the ending is one
of the least satisfying and most frustrating endings I have ever read
in a book of this sort) and I just didn't like this. Clearly there are
a lot of people nominating and voting for awards who think I'm wrong,
so your mileage may vary. But I thought it was unoriginal except for
the mythology, unsatisfying in the mythology, and full of unlikable
characters and unpleasant plot developments. I'm unlikely to read more
in this series.

Followed by Storm of Locusts.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-08-20

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-5344-1351-0.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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