Wake of Vultures

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.

Wake of Vultures is certainly exciting. It's also gritty and gory and so deep into its desert cowboy setting, every time you put it down you're tempted to shake the dust out of your boots.

The story follows a young outcast named Nettie Lonesome, a teenage girl of likely black and Native American descent, living a depressing life of servitude, who one day is forced to kill a vampire and suddenly discovers that there's a whole lot of other monsters where that came from. I liked Nettie, but didn't love her. I liked her honesty, her grit, and her sincere confusion about herself and the world around her. However, the reluctant hero trope got a little old here. Everywhere she went she was being shoved along on her quest, one that she didn't ask for but rather stumbled into. She did well with what she was handed, but she was handed nearly all of it.

The setting, the monsters, harpies and skinwalkers in the Old West, was the most intriguing aspect of this premise, and upon reading it was definitely the strongest aspect of the book. There's also some entertaining action sequences, and gruesome battles, which I enjoyed. But for me the characters just weren't enough. Nettie is interesting, and could potentially become a much stronger character in the later books, but for this one my lack of interest in her kept me from getting really engrossed.

I am too excited about this book to properly review it, so I'd just like to say this: please don't let your existing genre preferences dictate whether or not you will read Wake of Vultures. Read it now, before the next one comes out. Read it now, before Netflix makes a perfect season out of it (if they aren't already talking about this, they need to get up on it immediately before Starz or HBO does.)

A perfect book.