She joins Freddie Martinez, a film geek on scholarship hot-tempered, Stephen King–adoring Felicity Chu charming Thayer Turner, whose political family is compared to the Obamas and brooding golden boy Bram Wilding. Soon, she is initiated into the Mary Shelley Club, a tightknit group that requires secrecy and rule-following from its members. After a school party ends in a ghost story, a séance, and screaming, Rachel-who immersed herself in horror movies as a coping device-notices a prankster amid the chaos. The middle-class daughter of a faculty member, Rachel feels invisible except for her one new friend, harmless school gossip Saundra Clairmont. Rachel, a 16-year-old trauma survivor, is initiated into her private school’s secret society for horror fans.Ī year after surviving a violent attack, high school junior Rachel Chavez becomes the new girl at Manchester Prep on Manhattan’s affluent Upper East Side. The imaginative integration of real-world historical players into an equally messy, gruesome chronology artfully developed by the author makes this stand out.Ī seriously satisfying, worthy, and well-crafted sequel. That focus never strays even as Ireland touches briefly on social tensions between Native and black characters along with passing commentary on immigration and relations between Chinese families and other communities. At its core the book delves into a spectrum of black girls’ and women’s experiences, kinship, and necessary resilience. Then it’s a glorious race to the finish, with compelling moral examinations of human experimentation and killing for hire to fuel reader interest. The pacing is steady throughout the first part of the story, building and exploding into a gut-wrenching plot twist halfway through. Alternating between Jane’s haunted life with its Shakespearean overtones and Katherine’s more devout but no less deadly existence, each chapter takes readers farther west, with hopes resting on happy endings for the duo in California. This sequel to Dread Nation (2018) is told from the perspectives of the irascible Jane McKeene and her unlikely best friend, Katherine Deveraux, after they escape the unholy hell of Summerland, a social science experiment run by a maniacal minister through which black people were forced to protect whites from attacks by throat-chomping, undead shamblers.

Two young black women kick zombie ass from the post–Civil War East to the late-1800s American West.

Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland