PositiveLit ReactorI would highly recommend reading this novel on name recognition alone. (If you don’t know who he is, get to know him here.) ... His publisher for Good Indians , Saga Press—an imprint of Simon and Schuster—seems to agree that walking into this book blind is the best way to go ... I personally have a fairly strong stomach, but there were several moments I wanted to throw the book aside. I didn’t, though. And that’s the power of Jones’s writing, his ability to keep you reading even when parts inside scream at you to stop. It’s ultimately worth sticking it through to the end, as Jones gives his readers an utterly poignant climax and denouement, one that bridges considerations of the \'Old Ways\' and the ever-changing landscape of Indigenous people’s present and future.
Victor Lavalle
RaveLitReactorFantastic ... despite each writer working independently from one another, there is a sense they were, in fact, working from the same literary equivalent of a show bible, or a predetermined world-building script ... optimism runs deep throughout most of the stories contained in this volume, and many of them are downright hilarious and/or charming ... LaValle and co-editor John Joseph Adams do a superb job of varying length, tone, and tempo in a way that is neither jarring nor too safe and predictable. Dark stories seamlessly segue into more hopeful narratives; comedy and drama coexist, sometimes within the same tale. Moreover, while the stories do not unfold in a strictly linear fashion (which would be impossible), we do get a general sense of beginning in the not-too-distant future and traveling further and further into the decades, the millenniums, the eons, giving the anthology a narrative arc closer to a novel than a collection of disparate stories ... both timely and timeless. It is a sobering and enlightening glimpse into the tension, division, opposition, and terror characterizing the last few years, the last several years, the last hundreds of years, as well as, most likely, all the years to com ... features representations of these myriad means of resistance, making it not only an essential read for these current troubled times, but for all those troubled times yet to come.
Claire Vaye Watkins
RaveLitReactorWatkins's absolutely wonderful prose hypnotizes and transfixes the reader from the novel's onset. She works like a magician throughout, both in the form of an entertainer devoted to trickery and sleight of hand, and in the more archaic sense of the word, a figure more akin to a sorcerer, casting spells, making the impossible possible ... The landscape, surreal and ostensibly implausible, yet also so familiar, similarly straddles this line of relatable and foreign, a lush and populated world of Watkins's own invention, and yet distinctly our world as well, the world we know and love and often hate too, the world that beckons us like a siren, but also instills fear due to its patches of utter hostility.
