UPDATE: There's an interesting thread talking about the Indigenous rep available here.

I received an eARC from Edelweiss and a physical ARC through work.

This is a rather difficult book to rate and I almost want to get a final copy to see if the big issue that I had was fixed but I don't know...

I was incredibly disappointed in the use of the only Indigenous character. Particularly with how vocal Justina Ireland is on Twitter about PoC rep...this was incredibly underwhelming and not done well in my opinion. I truly hope this has been fixed in the final copy. Indigenous characters are rare enough in YA literature...

then there is a single one in this book which maybe has 5 speaking lines, is never developed, is very quickly pushed off screen to never return and you're lead to believe his only role was just helping the white politicians kidnap and deliver stolen black people! Are we still only writing Indigenous characters like that? It's very passingly clarified near the end that he helped Jackson escape but that's not a solution! It was even more heartbreaking to see this after reading the authors note. She took so much of the idea for this plot from the horrific Industrial schools used on the Native Americans yet mentioned them so passingly and never truly developed them. I expected more from this author.

PS, if you have a different view of this then I would love to hear it. I feel so weird that I’m the only one who seems to notice it or maybe I missed something?

I really adored the writing style of this book. I had to very sadly put it down a few times in order to go to work and I debated just calling in sick so I could keep reading. I loved our main characters and that so much of the focus was on friendship and family relationships instead of romance! Jane is sassy and made me burst out laughing several times at her comments.

I love the references to current events with the trigger happy white guard when Jane is on her first patrol. I really appreciated the comments on the different shades of skin. I feel like that's a topic that wasn't really being written about for a long time yet I have friends that are black that talked about it a lot.