Bring it, Denorah says in her head, and drops another through the net. If the only good Indian is a dead one, then she's going to be the worst Indian ever.

This was a tough one to review. Do not mistake the three stars as me feeling neutral; I have strong feelings about this story, but the things I liked and the things I didn't ended up canceling out and this is where I landed.

At its core, this is a revenge story where it's hard to root for anyone involved: either the aggrieved party or the aggressors. At face value that sounds intriguing to me because I love a good moral gray area, but it didn't turn all the way over for me here. I think it was primarily the pacing that threw me off; there are scenes where things go from perfectly normal to almost comically catastrophic way too abruptly, and then a mere two or three paragraphs later we're watching a scene play out that's meant to be taking place a week later than where we just were, all without a page break. The book is also mostly in third-person limited narration until halfway through when second-person narration is introduced for a specific character. It was an interesting narrative device that grew on me towards the end once I understood why it was being used, but it was pretty jarring the first time it happened.

I'm also aware that there were almost definitely a ton of references and nuances that were zooming right over my head because this is clearly a book written by, for, and about the modern Native American experience, specifically life on a reservation in the twenty-first century. I'm a white guy on the east coast; I have no idea what that life is like, but this did make me wish I understood the culture better. For example, there was a recurring basketball motif that kept making me think, "wait, why does basketball keep coming up?," that probably makes perfect sense to others that I'm not picking up on.

That said, there were some awesome quotes like the one listed at the top that made me stop and copy them down so I wouldn't forget them. There were a few scenes where the dialogue was confusing and unnatural, like you had two characters talking past and not to each other, but the prose was solid and edited well.

I appreciate that this is a horror story that doesn't fall into the "people are the scariest monsters of all" trope because there is some honest-to-god spooky shit that goes down. I just wish the scenes with dramatic action had me gasping rather than rolling my eyes. Also, multiple dogs are killed in different scenes in this book, so if that's not you're thing I'd recommend staying away.