From Gizmodo: Deathless Divide, Justina Ireland’s stellar follow up to her 2018 novel, Dread Nation…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!

The world can be utterly bleak nowadays. A government that seems to actively hate health and science, an economy ruled by a handful of lying billionaires, and continued state-sanctioned violence against Black people have ushered in a modern dystopia. But as I finished Deathless Divide, Justina Ireland’s stellar follow up to her 2018 novel, Dread Nation, I found myself sighing with relief.

The world may suck, but novels can navigate similar situations and give you a measure of hope. In both novels of Ireland’s series, hope is found even in the worst situations, and given the characters are living in a dystopia far worse than our own that hope feels as soothing as a balm.

The Dread Nation novels (published by HarperCollins) feel extraordinarily timely—despite both being written well before the pandemic or the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd. They’re set in an alternate version of the U.S. where the dead rose at Gettysburg and the warm weather Confederacy was forced to concede to the Union to avoid being overrun by zombies—who tend to be more limber and lively in a temperate climate. In this world, slavery was promptly abolished, but rich white men are always going to rich white man and suggested that Black people might be less susceptible to zombie bites, and thus better suited to fight them.

In our world, slavery was traded for a vicious prison system whose cheap labor is overwhelmingly made up of Black people. In the world of Ireland’s novels, that’s been traded for a law that demands every Black child must go to school and learn to put down the “shamblers.” Jane, the series’ primary heroine, has studied at a Maryland school for Black girls training to be bodyguards and attendants to white women—called Attendants in their world—and she is very good at killing the dead.

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