Wake of Vultures

I received this novel as an advanced copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

When I first received this novel, I didn't know what to expect. I'm not a fan of Western based stories and the last one I had read that was fantasy based was Blood Red Road, which was good but very unusual. I went into this story with more than a little apprehension and a lot of bias, I will admit it. However, after reading this novel, my opinion on Western fantasies has been completely changed and I am hooked to this series!

Nettie Lonesome is a half-breed who would much rather be a boy than a girl, who is treated like a slave by people who act as her "adoptive" parents. Life is not kind to her, and Nettie does the best she can in her circumstances. Then, one day, a stranger attacks her, a stranger who cannot be killed easily, not even with a sickle to the eye. In desperation, Nettie stabs him in the heart with a chunk of wood, which results in her attacker bursting into black sand.

And with this one death, Nettie can see like never before. Now, she can sense what others hide underneath the surface of their skin. The world is full of monsters that come in all different forms, and can only be killed in extraordinary ways. Haunted by spirits, Nettie is forced to set out on a quest for revenge that may just lead her to her true family.... if the monsters don't kill her first.

Let me begin by saying that I have never been a fan of novels that are based on the American west. I've never found them interesting, and I never really liked the slang words used and the constant presence of males and their guns and the horse riding. Yes, I know I complain a lot, but I have my preferences! However, I enjoyed the way the author wove this fantasy novel in this setting. It worked far better than I ever expected and I feel like it also allowed for various issues like gender, and race to be explored in great detail.

The main character is absolutely fascinating and multifaceted. The depth of Nettie's character and her internal dialogue and conflict makes her one of the best protagonists I have ever read. This is one of those times when a coloured person has been depicted in an absolutely perfect way, while also ensuring that the colour of the skin isn't the only issue at hand. Nettie struggles in determining where she belongs on so many levels. Not only does she not know who her people are, she can tell from the colour of her skin as well as the way others treat her that she doesn't belong among the white people. However, she also recognizes that she doesn't belong (and doesn't WANT to belong) to the female gender group; she constantly mentions how much happier she would be as a male and how much more comfortable she is in that gender role. I haven't really read any book that has a protagonist who struggles with gender identity, and I quite liked seeing that aspect. I also thought the author did a really good job in exploring Nettie's sexual identity, as well as that of other characters. Often I find that authors try to show their support for the LGBTQ community and incorporate a romance with those elements, but it usually fails in authenticity (or for other reasons). Not here. The author portrayed the relationships and feelings in a very realistic way that flowed with the rest of the story.

Now onto the story itself. In this book, Nettie comes face to face with monsters that we are both familiar with and also completely unaware of. Even those that we know of are not presented in the usual way. This was so refreshing. It was so awesome to be able to read about vampires and werewolves and all sorts of other magical creatures/monsters and see them as being unique, rather than just the same old thing. While most people would peg this down as just one more "quest" tale at first glance, reading it will completely change that opinion. There is so much more going on and this "quest" isn't just simplistic. I could continue to ramble on about this book forever but I won't. Suffice to say that this novel will take your love of fantasy to a whole new level!

Overall, this was a fantastic fantasy novel. I don't usually produce raving reviews, but when I do, you know I'm not exaggerating. There wasn't a single thing that I felt the author could have improved on. I loved the storyline, I loved the characters, I loved that it was more than just about romance or about killing evil things. There was real depth to this story and it pulled me in straight away. I can't wait to read the next book in this series!

A weird woman in the wildest west adventure, young Nettie Lonesome, is the most disadvantaged of the heroines I've met in western fantasy, but her limitations are also her focus and a significant portion of the story are encounters that give her understanding that the limits are arbitrary and external rather than intrinsic. The plot is largely a quest with increasingly nasty monsters encountered among occasionally not currently hostile monsters as Nettie, disguising herself as a boy, realizes that she is among the latter. Best of all, this well written and well paced books is a promising start to a series!

This was really quite good. It had a recommendation by Cherie Priest, and that worried me a bit, since I read one of her books (Maplecroft) and disliked it for being too dark and depressing. But this book was nothing like that. Lots of ugliness happening, of course, but there was no hopelessness. Nettie is a great character, who can be a bit coarse and difficult in the beginning, but she grows and gets to know herself better. Not to wonder she has difficulty accepting friendship at first, considering how little she got for the first years of her life. She is above all tenacious and courageous, risking herself several times to help her friends. The story moves along at a decent pace, and at times, quite a bit faster than that. Not all mysteries are resolved at the end, but it is rounded off enough for satisfaction. And if you're looking for diversity in fantasy, this is definitely one to try: aside from the main character being female, strong and smart and the book passing the Bechdel test, she is also half-comanche, half-black, identifies as male (and there are indications that this is not just to hide among men), and is attracted to both men and women. Aside from that, there are several native Americans and a gay guy. It's true that there are not a lot of women in the book, and that Nettie herself doesn't view women in a positive light, especially at first. This does make sense from her character's point of view, however, and I'm glad that the other woman who gets a decent amount of page time prefers dresses over men's clothes and teaches Nettie to accept more of herself. The only reason I am giving this 4 stars instead of 5 is that I prefer my books to be more immersive. It was a great read, and I was invested, but I did not have much trouble setting the book aside. I think the pace was a bit too fast, as if we were skimming over the story instead of sinking into it. Still, I'm already planning when to go into town to buy the next book. Highly recommended.

Wake of Vultures is the first book in The Shadow series by Lila Bowen. While I found the book in the regular fantasy section at the book store, the story has a definite YA feel to it. This was my first time reading a fantasy western. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book since westerns aren't normally my thing.All Nettie Lonesome wants out of life is to work as a hand at a ranch and spend her days training horses. Being a mixed race orphan girl and living practically as a slave to her adpotive parents it looks like her dreams will remain only a dream until she is attacked by a stranger. Grabbing the only thing near by to use in self defense Nettie stabs the man with a piece of wood through the heart which causes him to turn into... sand? This one act unlocks the "sight" in Nettie and soon she's seeing monsters and myths everywhere. It's a strange, strange world out there and it's not long before Nettie finds herself cursed by a dying Comanche woman to find and kill the monster that's been stealing children in the region. And the clock is ticking.Nettie is an interesting character. She's sixteen and there has not been much kindness in her life so far. She has been told so many times that she's worthless and useless due to her mixed blood that she believes it. It makes her prickly, with a rough attitude and a hard character to get to know. I found her alternatively frustrating and charming while at the same time feeling compassion for her. She's also had a very small world view, seeing most matters as black and white. This includes gender roles which is the catalyst for her deciding to identify herself as a man so she can work on a ranch. The real world is definitely a learning experience for her, especially when it comes to relationships between people. The setting is an alternative 1800s Texas. I like how Bowen used small bits of real history and worked it in to her fantasy world, the Durango Territory. I really enjoyed how she turned the Texas Rangers into a supernatural fighting group, those that kill what must be killed (monsters). Their methods are fairly heavy handed though and it gives them a reputation for wanton destruction, some of it seemingly well earned.There are some pretty great action scenes with the monsters. The book also touches on some deep subjects though since the book leans towards YA and is fairly short they aren't explored too deeply. These subjects include racism, sexism, gender identification, alternative relationships, the death of children and what really makes a monster. Fair warning: while the main story thread is wrapped up, the ending is a bit of a cliff hanger that is the hook for the second book. I enjoyed Nettie's story enough that I will likely continue it sometime in the future.

This dark weird western is an incredibly well-written and fast read, once it gets going, but it's also a difficult read. Bowen doesn't shy away from the racism and sexism of the old west in her re-styled historical fantasy setting of western Texas. Her heroine is a teenage girl of black and Native American heritage who has essentially been treated as a slave by her 'adoptive parents.' Nettie is a very relatable character, even through her rage and bluster, because you can't help but want her to discover her own self worth and a place to belong. She's on a hard journey, though. After she kills a strange being in self-defense, she finds that monsters exist all around her, and she's soon forced on a quest to kill a creature that is the very stuff of nightmares. If literature that includes rape and near-rape is a trigger for you, you should be able that the book is very blunt about the threat of such events. There were several assaults in the story that I found difficult to read, but in the end, I appreciated how Bowen handled the situations. The book ends with a cliffhanger--quite literally--so I'm glad I already have the second book as part of a 2-in-1 galley. I am left wanting to know more about this twisted western fantasy world.

Found abandoned as a baby, mixed-race Nettie Lonesome was taken in by an abusive and usually drunk couple that treat her like a slave. She is talented with horses, gently breaking them in on the barren little holding the family lives on. Then one night she has to fight off a vampire which turns to sand when she accidentally stabs it through the heart. She has gained a new talent, the ability to see monsters, an ability that also attracts monsters to her. Taking his clothes and money, Nettie runs from the farm. She dresses as a boy to escape unwanted attention and also because she is more comfortable that way. Firstly becoming a cattle wrangler, she encounters the destruction that monsters bring and a quest leads her to join the Texas Rangers, a group dedicated to hunting down all sorts of monsters. Nettie is after Pia Mupitsi, who snatches and eats children.This was different, and I liked it. The novel explores gender, sexuality and race issues. Nettie has a lot to work through!

Nettie Lonesome is a half-black, half-Comanche girl posing as a boy in this tale set in the Old West. She defends herself against a vampire one night and from then on is able to see monsters. A lot of monsters. When a dying woman curses Nettie with the task of killing one of the worst monsters or being haunted forever she sets out on a journey that may lead to more than she ever bargained for. This is the first book in a new series. Conspiracy of Ravens comes out in October.

Nettie Lonesome had been abandoned by her family and a childless family had taken her in. They claim that it had been like a daughter but it is closer to being a slave and unpaid servant - after all Nettie is half black, half Indian (the Native American type) in a world that does not accept non-white people too well. Welcome to Durango - in the territories where in our world USA was getting formed, in the second part of the 19th century (1870s according to the author but it is not that easy to pinpoint). And when she is 16 (or close enough), she escapes - and goes to work in the ranch next door. Because she is very good at gentling horses - pretending to be a boy of course. But before she manages to escape, she gets cornered in the barn by a man she had never seen and she manages to kill him, he turns into sand. Which is not normal even in this version of the Wild West. And all would have been fine if that did not end up worse news than just some strange things going pop in the night -- because once she had killed one of the creatures, she now can see them everywhere - hiding as people. Add to this an angry ghost that decides that it is Nettie's work to kill the big bad aka Cannibal Owl that had been kidnapping children from all over the place and Nettie is not a very happy girl. Or a boy. The first 100 pages or so are an almost classical Wild West story - a ranch, horses, wranglers, a saloon (the vampires there are a bit unusual but...), stealing cattle. A western with some supernatural elements. But then a few people die and Nettie had to run, towards the Owl; away from what she had known. And the world start getting weirder and weirder - shapeshifters and Rangers, death and not-so-much death. And one girl (well... boy on her head) that seems to be finding love among all the danger. The monsters and shapeshifters are presented as full human beings - bad or good, depending on their upbringing and lives - noone is bad by birth; everyone has a choice. The same way as everyone can decide what they want to be and who to love. Sometimes it feels as if the author is trying too hard to push that message - a little more subtlety will make the text stronger. A fair warning though - quite a lot of bad things happen to both good and bad people. And a lot of them are described in detail. Added to the crass language that everyone tends to use now and then (most of the novel is Nettie's thoughts even if it never slips into the first and the narrative always remains in the third) may grate on more sensitive people. Sometimes it is just to make a point, sometimes it is part of the story. By the end of the story a lot more people are dead - both friends and foes. And Bowen finishes in a cliffhanger - with Nettie believing that she had finally figured out who she is and leaping at it. I have the suspicion that she is at least partially right but need to wait for the next volume to find out. Not a bad start for a series - and I will be interested to see where it goes next.

A Western/horror novel with a protagonist who is half black and half native; born female, but doesn't really view herself as either male or female; and who is attracted to both men and women? This could have gone horribly, horribly wrong in so many ways. That it didn't is a testament to Bowen's skills as a writer. The plot was a little Buffy-meets-L'Amour, but the character of Nettie/Nat and the mingling of various folklores (sirens and dwarves and chupacabras all make appearances) keep it from becoming too mundane or predictable. Really, though, it is the depiction of Nettie as a character who is so fully herself, despite not fitting into the neat little boxes society wants to put her in that makes this book something special. Which is sad, really. An honest depiction of a character like Nettie shouldn't be cause for celebration. It should be normal and every day and boring. Unfortunately, it's not, so I'll celebrate the Nettie/Nats where I find them.

I found this a bit of a plod to get through. Nettie is an abandoned, mixed race child, treated like a slave, who disguises herself as a boy to be able to have the life that will permit her to live as she wants. She discovers that her world is not the world she thought she knew and that she has a part to play in pursuing a supernatural evil. The character was interesting in that she was trying to find out who she was without being defined by her sex or race and the dry, western wasteland with lurking evil in every corner was also interesting, but the story just seemed to take awhile to get where it was going. Perhaps for younger readers?

I liked this book a lot. The protagonist is not the sort of person who usually gets to be a protagonist in an Old West setting (she's biracial, trans/non-binary gendered, and bisexual). Since she starts out so isolated, her understanding of many things about the world develops over the course of the book. Sometimes this makes for uncomfortable reading -- she starts out with some crappy ideas about women, which makes sense in the story, but it often felt like the author was flirting with the "transmasculine people are only that way because sexism / because they didn't have good woman role models" trope. By the end I don't /think/ that was her intent, but...The world is full of moral ambiguity; few people are all good or all bad. Refreshingly for a story with "monster hunter" elements, the supernatural creatures also have moral complexity to them, and it's not always clear who's in the right. I look forward to the sequel.

I'm always a sucker for a weird western, but solid exploration of gender, race, and sexuality mixed in with the six-guns and chupacabras made this better than just a fun read.

I loved watching how Nettie/Rhett learned to question the assumptions they'd grown up with and demand more. Really engaging narrative voice in a creepy world, and such a pleasure to read a book that centers the experiences of people who aren't white men.

Refreshing to read a book that uses gender, race, and sexual identity 'talking points' without being preachy, especially when it's a well-written supernatural western.

Trigger warning: rapeWake of Vultures is a fantasy Western novel. I found it a mixed bag. Basically, I found the thematic content far more interesting than the plot itself.Nettie Lonesome is a mixed race sixteen year old working for people who treat her like a slave, even if they don’t call her one. She dreams of getting out, but nothing in her life looks like it’ll change until she gets attacked by a stranger. When she stabs him with a piece of wood in self defense, he… crumbles into sand? Soon Nettie learns that she’s gained the sight, and she starts encountering weird creatures out of myths and folklore everywhere. To add to everything, an dying woman binds her to go seek out and kill the monster that’s been killing local children.The plot of Wake of Vultures is incredibly episodic, with Nettie encountering different varieties of monsters. It reminds me of the beginnings of first season Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I actually watched, before I got bored and quit. Episodic monster killing just isn’t my thing. Additionally, the monsters all felt incredibly random, vampires, chupacabras, and harpies for instance. They don’t feel like they fit in the same book. Chupacabras make sense for a setting based on Texas, and I guess vampires get around. But harpies? Did they immigrate from Greece or something?Besides from the monsters, there wasn’t any other noticeable fantasy elements to Wake of Vultures. I think the randomness of the monsters is an indication of the book’s weak world building. You can have a lot of completely different monsters in the same book, but you have to integrate them somehow. Wake of Vultures never did, and it didn’t make up for it with a strong sense of place.“The world was not a place of black and white, night and day. It was shades of gray and shadows, dusk and dawn, in-between moments and shifting sands.”A strong theme of Wake of Vultures is questioning and dismantling societal binaries. Nettie doesn’t fit easily into the boxes that society likes to make. She’s biracial – half black and half Native American and bisexual. She also questions gender throughout the book. She wears men’s clothes and is disguised as a man for most of the book. She doesn’t really identify as a girl, but over the course of the story realizes that there’s more possibilities.“Nettie didn’t feel much like a girl, but she didn’t feel much like a boy, either. She just… was.”In sum, Wake of Vulture has a lackluster plot but one of the most interesting explorations of gender that I’ve ever seen from a fantasy novel. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but if you have a particular interest in these themes or a genderqueer biracial protagonist who kills monsters, you’ll probably enjoy the book.Originally published on The Illustrated Page.

I really like alt-westerns and gritty gals and diversity and shapeshifters, so I dig this book something fierce. That said, I really appreciated the author's thoughtful acknowledgement note that she's playing in a sandbox with a history that's not truly hers. It adds a note of grace to an already strong and singing book. See you again soon, I hope, Nettie Lonesome.

4 1/2 stars What a wonderful Western/Fantasy setting with a complicated POV character. So many Lonesome Dove call outs. "Gloomy Bluebird". Ha.

True Blood meets American Vampire meets Pretty Deadly?

Just WOW. I really love the current wave of Old West-inspired fantasy, steampunk, and horror, and "Wake of Vultures" is such a great addition to my current list of favorite dark fantasy novels. Although populated by vampires, sirens (yes, in the desert), and dread figures from Comanche folklore, "Wake of Vultures" is, at its core, a searing coming-of-age narrative. Nettie is a girl of mixed heritage and unsure sexuality struggling to carve a place for herself, both in the world of monsters and in the world of normal (but still crazy, as she thinks several times) people.

Humorous, terrifying, and oddly heartwarming at times.

I've been avoiding the current trend in vampire books for YA, but this one was different enough that I thought I'd give it a try.The audio version was very entertaining, though by the end I was getting pretty tired of every other word out of Tess's mouth being some kind of cowboy cuss/slang. The author kept the action moving fast enough that the characters didn't always have time to figure out what was going on.You could also call this a "coming-of-age" book, as the orphaned teen girl goes through a lot of changes and learning in the few compressed months. Quite a few gory details described, but I think the distraction of listening to an audio version while I was driving kept me from getting too engrossed in them.

I received this book via Goodreads first-reads, thank you!I like cover a lot, white background and black feather and the perfectly red line for the bookshelf order. Excellent.The book is real debut, surprising rancho-western mixed fantasy-vampires plot. Strong main characters with twists and surprises, unexpected deaths for characters I did not see to come, unexpected content of the whole story. Intriguing what the next book in the series may bring - as I am clues where the story will lead, what will happen and how it will be written. The story is about the girl who struggles to survive all her life, learned long time ago that Pap and Mam don't love her; she grows up with her own vision that being a woman is pointless, thus main character, Nettie, tries to ignore her gender and identifies herself more as a boy; she grows up with a dream one day to escape and live far better; she has bare image what family stands for and how boy+girl or any human relationship works. She has learned to break horses all her life and find horses as something she understands. Than the opportunity strikes her to work in a ranch which she takes - it leads to new discoveries and experience, first shooting, first monster attack and getting damned by dead woman which leads Tassie to take a horror journey and learn how to free the world from nasty creatures.

I LOVED this story! It's going on my 10* favorites shelf. I think you absolutely have to listen to the audio to get the full experience of Nettie Lonesome aka Nat aka Rhett.

On the surface it's a dark and gritty, western fantasy but down deep it's a whole lot more then that. The author touches on quite a few serious topics-gender identity; sexual orientation, racism, cultural identity, slavery etc.

The entire story was just so well written too. If you haven't read it, you should definitely add it the audio to your 'TBR-Now' pile.

Wow. I'm not entirely sure what to say about this book. I loved it, and was tremendously impressed by it – but, oddly, I made only one note as I read it. Maybe I was just too caught up in the read to think about it. Lila Bowen takes a corner of space and time that few others have paid attention to, and she makes it her own. It's a ways after the Civil-War in the Southwest US, yet Nettie Lonesome is basically a slave. Black amid whites, a girl with the desire and ability to do the things only men do, utterly unloved and unremarked, when her life is changed by an unexpected, unexpectedly supernatural attack, she walks away from her old life with hardly a thought, and remakes herself. She goes with her instincts and disguises herself – successfully – as a boy: Rhett. In the best F&SF tradition, she begins to seek to create her own family where none has ever existed for her before. And then things turn upside-down again. Ghosts, creatures, shapeshifters – after a childhood and youth of unrelentingly painful sameness, suddenly she has more excitement to face than she could ever have dreamed. And she falls in with the Rangers – who, it turns out, are primarily tasked with fighting not Indians or Mexicans but supernatural dangers. This was a fascinating aspect of the story for me. At one point the captain muses about perception. They would follow a trace or a cry for help into a town or settlement, where something would have been having its way with the populace, laying waste and eating its fill. In would come the Rangers, and destroy the whatever-it-was – but "by the time news reaches a town, all that's left of the monsters is sand and ashes." A number of citizens are dead; those who saw what did it don't believe the evidence of their own sense; the things that did do it are dead and gone. And there are the Rangers, figuratively standing over the bodies. "We keep folks safe, and they villainize us for it…" There are lots more surprises, for the reader and for Nettie herself, all the way up to the end – which (warning!) is an all but literal cliffhanger. I have never been so glad to have immediate access to a sequel, I think, because I was fully invested in the story, the setting, and the characters – especially, of course, Nettie herself. It's a wonderful, remarkable, unique world Lila Bowen has created out of this desert.The usual disclaimer: I received this book via Netgalley for review.

Quick & Dirty: Rangers, all manner of supernatural and one half breed girl who is going to kill the boogie man.Opening Sentence: “Nettie Lonesome had two things in the world that were worth a sweet goddamn: her old boots and her one-eyed mule, Blue.”The Review:Nettie Lonesome is a girl that has been pretending to be a boy for a long time until one day at the place she was raised, a man attempts to harm her and then she can see what it’s really like to be a part of this world. Nettie finds out a little later that he was a vampire, and she finds that because she killed the man who attacked her, she can now see all the monsters clearly. Except not all of them are monsters. After she kills another snake-like monster, Coyote Dan saves her life and she has a vision quest.She begins to find out how different she is, not just from the other normal humans who hunt monsters, but from the monsters too. After Dan takes her to the Rangers so she can hunt Cannibal Owl and save all the children, she begins to discover more about herself and who she really is. Nettie is the shadow, but what does this mean, and will she be able to save the children and her friends?This has been in my TBR since I saw the cover, I really didn’t read the blurb, so until I started reading this I had no clue what this was really about. It did strike me as similar to Vengeance Road and another book, both with female main characters pretending to be boys, but I will say that’s where the similarities end. The other books were straight up westerns, and this was a paranormal western. The author included almost every aspect of paranormal from the traditional Native skinwalkers to werewolves, and vampires and harpies. I didn’t quite love that because I feel like if you are going to do a story heavy on a particular mythology you should stay in the one, however, I did really enjoy the story. It was very different and I loved that even if I had little hangups on a couple of issues.Nettie is a half black, half Comanche girl who really doesn’t remember where she is from. She was raised by a couple who called her daughter but treated her as a slave, so she’s not especially trusting of anyone. Initially, I wasn’t a fan of the attempted romances, she was attracted to Sam and Sam was attracted to her (well really him) and she was attracted to Winnfred, and Dan and deeply confused over it all. However, now that I am done reading the book and reflecting on it I find that it actually adds to the story. She is a girl from two worlds neither gains her a foothold in the world she lives, so she is struggling with how to identify herself and throughout the whole book calls herself a half-breed, and struggles with attraction to both sexes, so in that same vein you have a girl who feels more comfortable as a boy and she is trying to figure where she fits in this world.In the authors afterword she describes the two natured and I think that fits Nettie wonderfully, not only because of the mixed heritage but the struggle with sexuality. That adds a whole other layer to this book and really adds to how much I enjoyed it. I mean we are looking for books that make us think, not just a good story. So, I fully admit that I enjoyed the heck out of this book and can’t wait to get my hands on book 2.Notable Scene:“No, she snatched the sickle from the wall and spun around to face him under the hole in the roof.”“She’d never felt safe a day in her life, but now she recognized the chill hand of death, reaching for her.”“Pia Mupitsi comes in the night, puts children on a spike and takes them away forever.”“Said she’d be seeing the goddamn things everywhere, now.”“Waiting for salvation had never done her a damn lick of good.”“They spent the morning practicing different ways to kill the unkillable.”FTC Advisory: Orbit/Hachette provided me with a copy of Wake of Vultures. No goody bags, sponsorships, “material connections,” or bribes were exchanged for my review.

Excellent. Written at a young adult level. Similar to The Silver Road by Gilmore

I learned about this book from Robots vs. Fairies. The one written by Lila Bowen (a.k.a. Delilah S. Dawson) especially flipped my cookie. And like I suspected, it was based on an already existing character.I liked it, but how much are you going to like it? I have no idea. All I can do is report on the content, how it made me feel, and anything interesting about it. For me, the selling point was the western-fantasy genre. You don’t see that much. Certainly a breath of fresh air from all those women holding a knife while walking away in tight jeans and a tramp stamp. The main character has a strong voice. She’s not too wimpy, but she’s not perfect either.This book is fantastically written. The prose is beautiful, the sentences strong. It’s a captivating plot, fascinating characters. It’s a “weird western”/fantasy genre, where the main character can now “see” monsters and is on a hunt to kill them (a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer). And there’s a significant part of the text dedicated to her finding her sexual identity. So I understand why it had trouble finding its audience. There are a lot of potentially triggering subjects here.But I plan to read the sequel, I liked it that much.