The first novel in the Shadow series. (Books 2-4 also available now.)

The novel features a very good protagonist, one readers will root for. The writing is well-paced and flows quite nicely. If you're a fan of fantasy that has a western-feel to it, then I'd certainly recommend it. (More-recent comparators might be Triggernometry and Sarah Gailey's American Hippo novellas.)

An interesting read. Recommended.

Thanks to Orbit Books/Hachette Audio for my review copy of Wake of Vultures in exchange for an honest review.

Wake of Vultures is, in equal parts, a coming-of-age story that delightfully breaks the mold, a western that’ll get you itchin’ to ride a saddle, and a monster story with its own mythos and heart.

“Nettie’s one-eyed glare was flat, her patience gone. “I’m the feller that’s going to kill you.”
“You’re not a feller.”
“That’s not yours to decide.”

Nettie Lonesome doesn’t know quite what she is, other than that she’s 100% herself. Her life offers little hope of a future – she’s a half-black, half-Native American girl who is treated like a slave by two people who claim to be her parents. Though she’s a girl, she identifies as a man. Nettie doesn’t want to spend her time knitting or washing clothes – she’d rather be breaking a bronco and working with the cowboys that live their lives in the plains of the Durango territory. Nettie’s life is a whirlwind of mixed identities, and she tries every way she can to break the constraints of a half-blooded slave who thinks she’s a man.

Then one day, her opportunity comes in an unlikely fashion. Nettie is attacked by a stranger who looks like a man, but has long fangs and is seemingly unkillable. That is, until in a last-ditch effort Nettie drives a stick into his heart and he dissolves into sand. Now granted with the ability to see the monsters lurking around her, Nettie’s life can never go back to being what it once was.

“You were raised by ignorant people. They taught you to use things before you understood them. To kill things before you recognized them. To hate things before you knew them. But you’ll appreciate a thing better when you know where it comes from, when your hands know the shape of it.”

First off, it’s a credit to Lila Bowen’s writing that she can pull of such an atypical, conflicted character in a relatively short book. I love character-driven fantasy and Nettie’s role in Wake of Vultures fits the bill. As hard as writing a half-black, half-Native American girl who identifies as a boy sounds, Lila Bowen makes it look easy. Nettie is a delightful character to read.

The fantasy of Wake of Vultures is really cool. At first I was reminded of American Gods (hidden myths in plain sight!) but Wake of Vultures does live and work by its own rules and didn’t feel derivative once I got into the story. Also, I lovedthe Coyotes (no spoilers).

Where I feel that Wake of Vultures fell short was some of the story and pacing. At times I felt like Nettie and her companions were wandering around the desert, because much of the time they were. I didn’t mind it terribly much because I enjoy the Durango territory, the Rangers, and several other plot elements. But a few storylines did feel a bit open-and-shut, a little too episodic for me.

One final note – Lila Bowen’s writing is superb. She nails character voice for Nettie and does a good job of establishing an appropriately Western tone for the story without hitting the reader over the head with tumbleweed references.

Read Wake of Vultures if you’re into unique character perspectives, Western settings, and monster stories.

4.5 stars. An excellent, immersive fantasy-western (yes, that is a thing!) with a unique main character. Nettie's journey from isolated, abused farmgirl to valued member on a team of "supernatural rangers" is fascinating, but no more so than her more personal journey to selfhood. The plot and the setting are great, but clearly the central features of this book are its concerns with race and gender.

For the most part I liked how this book handled these difficult topics. There was a strong whiff of the 'magical indian' trope in Coyote Dan, although this is hard to get around if you want to have indigenous shapeshifters in one's novel in the first place, and it is largely mitigated by the fact that Nettie herself is of mixed-race and, having lost her birth-family as a young child, seeking answers about her heritage. Gender-wise, I would say that Nettie (aka Nat) is genderqueer though of course she would not know that word. She starts off the book with an unexamined view of men VS women based on her very limited experience of the world up to that point, identifying more with men and masculine pursuits in part because she views women as inferior, but once she goes out and starts to meet more people, those assumptions are quickly checked and rejected -- all still without resulting in Nat's being boxed in as any one thing.

I loved the relationships and the dialogue, too, with a relatively wide range of characters within the Western scheme. One really gets the complex emotions that Nettie feels when she is with, say, Hennessy, among others.

I could have done without quite so much sexual violence, is one of my main critiques. I realize that this was a feature of the old west and most Westerns, and was also (and unfortunately still is) a feature of life for genderqueer/genderfluid/trans people. But still. It's a little overly-relied upon as a plot point -- especially frustrating when it is something so difficult to read about again and again.

But overall I would highly recommend this book.

Wake of Vultures is book one in the Shadow series by Lila Bowen and introduces us to its main character, Nettie Lonesome. An orphaned girl, raised by people who use her like a slave and treat her as less than human. Nettie has learned to keep herself quiet and hidden but soon enough, it will become impossible for her to hide from what is coming.

One day, while her adoptive parents are resting a stranger comes to Nettie's farm. He attacks her and she is forced to stab him through the eye with a sickle. To her horror, he does not die, he simply plucks the sickle out of his eye and keeps coming at her, his teeth long and sharp. That is when she realizes that he is not a normal man and that she is not just a normal Indian girl taken in by white settlers. Nettie fights back against the monster and stabs him in the heart with a piece of wood. The creature turns to black sand. He was a vampire and Nettie, well Nettie is something else.

"...Religion and legend aren't always the same thing. The Comanche follow no gods. But there are legends, like Pia Mupitsi. Among our kind-monsters, as my brother calls us-it's said that a shadow will rise to fight evil. But 'Shadow' is said as a name, as an unstoppable force. The Shadow moves among us but cannot be found, cannot be sensed. It can see us, find us, track us. And destroy us. The Shadow is a hunter. A weapon. A new kind of monster.'
She looked at Nettie with slender eyebrows raised, a heavy significance falling between them.
'And you're saying you think that's me?' Nettie rocked back, laughing and surprising Ragdoll into a snort and twitch. 'Coyote girl, I ain't nothin'. A vampire almost killed me, then a lizard feller nearly killed me, and then your brother barely stopped a harpy from killing me. Hell, even a chunk of mesquite nearly killed me. I ain't a hunter. I'm barely a wrangler. I ain't a new kind of monster.' She spit at the girl's feet and shook her head. 'I ain't your Shadow.'
'Listen to yourself. Almost. Nearly. Barely. You're still alive. When you should be dead..."

Nettie has a gift, she can see monsters. Even when they are disguised as humans, she knows who they are. That helps her be the perfect hunter. But it also makes her the hunted. There is a new monster out there. A legend as old and dark as they come. He is known as the Cannibal Owl and he lays waste to whole villages and settlements. He comes for the children, but mostly, he wants the one child who escaped him so long ago. Now Nettie, the monster hunter, is being hunted.

This is truly a good story and I love that it strays from the glut of YA paranormal novels by keeping the sappy romance out of it and making its hero not the cover model caricature that fills up so many YA books today. Instead Nettie is a young girl who has no place her world. She soon finds out that it isn't just being a orphan Indian child in a white world that keeps her apart. But her gift and the probability that she may be far more than human. The spirits and monsters are not your regular characters either. There are vampires and werewolves but also a strong helping of native american lore and legend that is far more interesting.

The weakness to this book is its setting. Not that it is the old west so much but that the interaction between Nettie and the settlers and the rangers is something out of stock 1960s tv show. It is so lacking in originality that it actually holds the characters back. There is the crusty old cow hold, the judgmental townspeople, the young wrangler who romanticizes the west and Nellie herself, who doesn't shake the caricature of the young ugly western girl until the end when she finds out how powerful she is. It actually distracts from what is really a very good story.

Overall the book is good and dares to be the one thing that is not done in YA novels as of late.

It dares to be different, and in doing so, borders on being original.

A good read that has me interested in the next book in the series.

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 <I>something</i> 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.

Orbit Books and NetGalley have provided me with an electronic copy of Wake of Vultures. This is my honest opinion of the book.

Nettie Lonesome is half Indian and half Black, dresses like a boy, and is treated like the help by the people who are raising her. One day, after a traumatic event shakes Nettie to the core, her life changes. Seeing monsters everywhere she goes is not what Nettie had in mind, however. When it becomes impossible for Nettie to continue on as a wrangler, she decides to seek out the family that she has never known. Along the way, harpies, vampires, and other creatures that go bump in the night threaten her very existence.

Wake of Vultures is a fantasy Western, complete with cowboys, wranglers, and a multitude of creatures. In the author's zeal to give the Western aspects some authenticity, with regards to language especially, the fantasy parts of the book seem out of place. There is a lot of action sequences that carry the book along, but the real meat to the novel - the plot - is largely absent. Wake of Vultures was clearly not the book for me, but readers who enjoy fantasy Westerns might feel differently.

I gave this book 2.5 stars! I haven't read many YA Westerns, or Westerns in general, so this was certainly an experience. If I had to sum this book up in a word, it would be 'fine'. This book was fine. It was interesting and engaging but it didn't necessarily wow me in any way. It seemed to drag on a bit, it may just be me, but it did get a little too slow and repetitive for my liking. But the majority of it was interesting enough and I had fun reading this story. It was really interesting to see how the magic mingled in with the setting. It was pretty cool and well done!

The read for this was a bit tedious and long, so that's one of the main things that put me off of it so quickly. I just found myself getting tired while I was reading this. However, the characters were interesting and I really loved the creativity and originality behind this novel. It was very, very interesting!

I absolutely loved this book, and I would give it 6 stars if my rating scale went that far. It's a mesmerizing mixture of western, fantasy and horror that captured my imagination and had me remembering Stephen King's Dark Tower series (which has a special place in my heart, so that's the best praise there is).

Nettie Lonesome has never seen anything past the farm of her adoptive parents who treat her more like a slave. She is part black and part Indian, abandoned when she was just a baby, unwanted by anyone in the world, or so her adoptive parents claim. And she believed them until one fateful night when a stranger with teeth longer and sharper than any human should have attacks her in the barn and crumbles into sand when she manages to kill him. Now she sees things that other people can't see. And a ghost on a black horse has sworn to haunt her until the end of time if she doesn't go West and kill the Cannibal Owl, a monster who's been stealing children from every village in Durango country.

Remember when Roland walked through a desert in his pursuit of the Man in Black in The Gunslinger? Well, Nettie Lonesome lives in that harsh desert, with all its horrors and small victories. Here the terrain is unforgiving, and the people are but specks in the sand, hiding in their small villages. Monsters are real. And the Cannibal Owl is a monster that even other monsters fear.

Wake of Vultures would have been good just for the excellent worldbuilding alone, but when you add a strong protagonist to the mix, it becomes simply awesome. Nettie Lonesome is tough as nails. She'd learned early on that she could only rely on her own wits and sharpshooting skills, so she doesn't yield easy and she definitely doesn't take any bullshit from anybody. The flip side of this is that it’s extremely hard for her to accept help and trust anyone who offers that help, because in her life everything always came with strings attached. So she is suspicious of anyone she meets and can be extremely pigheaded at times.

But what I love the most about Nettie is that she doesn't let others define who she is. She's always been the odd one out - not white, not black, not even brown, but a strange mixture of everything. She was born a woman, but prefers living her life as a man, because she finds nothing in common with the women she's seen in the little village she spent her life in. She is attracted to both men and women and finds no shame in that. She is who she is and she won't bend to the rules of a society that has rejected her since her birth just because of the color of her skin.

In addition to an excellent world and strong protagonist, the story is fast-paced and interesting, and the secondary characters are complex if not always likable. They are flawed and human, even if some of them are technically monsters.

I would recommend this book for anyone who loved the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, or to anyone who simply wants to read a gripping story set in an unusual world. As for me, I can't wait to see where Nettie's journey will lead her so I'm ready to sink my teeth in to the Conspiracy of Ravens.

PS. I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.