Originally posted on GoodReads.

Synopsis: Nettie Lonesome lives in a land of hard people and hard ground dusted with sand. She's a half-breed who dresses like a boy, raised by folks who don't call her a slave but use her like one. She knows of nothing else. That is, until the day a stranger attacks her. When nothing, not even a sickle to the eye can stop him, Nettie stabs him through the heart with a chunk of wood and he turns to black sand.

And just like that, Nettie can see.

But her newfound sight is a blessing and a curse. Even if she doesn't understand what's under her own skin, she can sense what everyone else is hiding—at least physically. The world is full of evil, and now she knows the source of all the sand in the desert. Haunted by the spirits, Nettie has no choice but to set out on a quest that might lead her to find her true kin... if the monsters along the way don't kill her first.

Rating: 5/5

Admittedly, if I were to see this book maybe even a few months ago and read that it was a fantasy western along with the above synopsis, I wouldn't have read it. I'm not a big fan of anything that's not sci-fi (although I haven't read much of it and am trying to change that) or contemporary (but even then fluffy romance is my go-to because I'm done with this grim dark take that oversaturates media), but it was recommended to me by a friend because the protagonist is a girl who dresses up as a boy and that, in later books, fully transitions into using he/him pronouns and goes by another name (this being relevant to something I'm currently writing). And just like that, I was willing to try out a genre I'd never touch except for in video games (shoutout to Red Dead Redemption and Fallout New Vegas).

So, if you'll excuse my inner southerner coming out, y'all mind if I holler 'bout this book?

Because, boy, am I hollering! I swear that I'm never going to push away a genre out of sitting in my comfort zone because, God, you've done it to me again. I'm, very honestly, really close-minded when it comes to the media I consume. This comes from years of reading and watching what was trending until I hit a point in my late teens where I just went, "Damn, that isn't fun at all" and I realized that having fun wasn't reading what everyone else read or watching what everyone else watched and then wondering why I still felt like I wasn't satisfied as a consumer.

So I started taking my media consumption and I narrowed it and narrowed it until it included a very small range of things — things that I genuinely liked from the premise. I'm not the person who (when this was still a popular music platform) clicks "I want to try something new/different" on Pandora or iHeartRadio. I never have been. But over the years and even the past few months, I've realized that I'm not going to learn anything if I'm in this same sandbox that I've been content in forever.

And that speaks to the book that Wake of Vultures is. It's not the book I would've picked up of my own choice in a bookstore ever, quite frankly. (And if it doesn't sound like your type of book, I highly encourage just trying it out, just for a bit.) But I'm damn glad it was recommended to me because it changed everything. I won't talk about plot at all in this review because it took a backseat to what really kept me going. Not to say that the plot was bad — I really enjoyed it, along with the pacing, but it wasn't what I came out of the book wanting to write about.

Nettie Lonesome (I'll refer to her in she/her pronouns since the narrative does for this book) is comfortable with the world she knows, as most YA protagonists are. And when her world gets turned upside down, she doesn't want it at first, as most YA protagonists don't. She goes through the traditional Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, and then eventual Acceptance of the Call. But what makes her different from every other protagonist out there (that I've seen at least)?

She's the darnedest, most unique character on this side of the Durango.

(I wasn't kidding about my inner southerner coming out, by the way.) To start off, I'll just say that I'm pretty sure Lila Bowen is a white (appears to be so) woman, but I don't know her actual ethnicity beyond what she physically looks to be. That being said, I'll assume she's white until I find out otherwise. And that is truly important to how I look at this book because it's an amazing example of writing outside of one's voice. There is care and dedication put on every page to Nettie's voice, her racial identity (half-black, half-Comanche), her gender identity, and even the identities of the supporting cast around her.

The voice is so real and strong and distinct — it's a western book. It can't be without a good ol' twang and a crap ton of cursing. That's the world that Nettie lives in, gritty and messy, and Bowen's way with words made me simply forget that I was reading a western. I was living in it. I could taste the dirt in the air. (I didn't like it. It was coarse and rough and irritating and it got everywhere.) But the environmental realism isn't the big thing that had me swept off of my feet.

It was the characters, God, the characters. I loved them all. I grieved the ones who died and sat on the edge of my seat for the ones who were threatened by the possibility of death. It's written in third person close, but I felt the relationships between Nettie and Coyote Dan, Nettie and Sam, Nettie and Winifred, and so on as if the book had been written in first person. Bowen loves this book. I can just tell. I'm not black or Native American myself, so I can't speak to how she handles the accuracy of things brought up on the page, but I honestly would go out on a gander and say that she's done her research and gotten sensitivity readers because it shows in the feelings. It shows in reading the crisp voices of the characters that flow so well off of the page that you forget someone had to purposefully put those words down in the first place. The characters have genuine conflict with each other, instead of it feeling like forced feelings, and they're all so raw. Everything is so g-ddamn real. I'm in love.

And the star of it all. Nettie.

So, Nettie dresses up like a boy, right? Simple enough. It could stop there with that one fact. Fact: Joan of Arc dressed up as a man to go to war. Fact: Mulan did, too. Fact: And so did Eponine. This could just be another story of a girl who doesn't feel heard or seen or listened to in a man's world, so she dresses up as a boy. But it pushes and pushes and goes way beyond that. In later books, I already know that she changes her pronouns and goes by the name Rhett. So, she's trans. As of Wake of Vultures, she doesn't know she's a trans boy, and it could stop there. But it doesn't, and I really have to be in awe and applaud Bowen for the enormous task she undertook with writing Nettie's story. Not only does the narrative touch on Nettie's gender identity but it touches on her sexual identity, too, and her conclusion? It's a g-ddamn mess is what it is. (And she's the trans, possibly bisexual, bronco-wranglin', monster-huntin', spittin', snake-skewerin', horse-ridin' social-and-romantic disaster of a cowboy the LGBTQ+ community deserves.)

And it is. And that's so thought-provoking in a way I truly didn't expect to see from a YA fantasy western about cowboys hunting monsters. Nettie grows up in a world where she's discriminated against in multiple layers: her skin and her gender. She can't change her skin color, but she can change how she dresses. And here's where it gets complicated. She states several times that she does feel like she's seen and respected better when she dresses like a boy. Is it survival? Nettie perceives a clear, real disadvantage to being a girl in the life she lives; she's susceptible to being assaulted, catcalled, etc. So, when she dresses up like a boy, when she eventually joins a group of Rangers and goes by the name Rhett, is it because she sees an advantage or is it because she is a boy? What makes a cis tomboy, a butch lesbian, and a trans boy different? Small things. Superficially, they're all generally defined and categorized by masculine traits (reminder that gender is a social construct). But what makes them truly different?

The following quote from the book pretty much sums it up very well:

Nettie's [...] 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."

Hot diggity dog, if that didn't hit me like a ton of bricks when I read it. Over and over again, people call Nettie a girl. She protests just as repeatedly. At points, it's used as an insult to her. She still fights back against it. For most of the book, it is a ruse. The Rangers wouldn't have taken her if they knew she was a girl. She presumes that nobody would have. But in the climax of the book, when she's facing off against the monster that she's destined to chase down, it's personal. The Rangers aren't there with her. The ruse doesn't have to still be held up. And, yet, she still fires back with, "That's not yours to decide." And that is what identity is. It's not anyone else's to decide but yours. While tomboy bleeds into butch lesbian bleeds into trans boy at certain points (and doesn't at other points), at the end of the day, the label is what you choose that you feel most comfortable and happiest with.

The whole survival and disadvantageous-to-be-a-girl thing does play into Nettie's gender identity confusion, I think. It completely can, given the setting and narrative. She sees how her world treats women, and she doesn't want it. It's part of her struggle, and part of how she is growing into her own skin. But it doesn't invalidate the answer she eventually comes to in later books, either, that she is a boy. Maybe she does want to dress up like a boy because it's important for her survival and safety. But she also reacts with anger and irritation when people call her a girl and she actively refers to herself as a "feller" in scenes where she doesn't need to keep up her disguise. I went and had a discussion about this exact topic with the friend who recommended this book to me, and they said something very insightful: the two aren't mutually exclusive. Nettie is a boy to survive because she would be in more danger as a girl, and Nettie is a boy because... she just is. Because she feels like a boy.

The world sees Nettie as a girl, but that's not theirs to decide. It's her identity, her decision, and she chooses Rhett.

Buddy read with Kirsten, who's the friend I kept mentioning who recommended me this book.