I loved Dread Nation and could not wait for the sequel, which finally came out back in February. When I found myself between audiobooks a while back, I checked again to see if this had been published yet. Not only had it been released, but my library didn’t even have a waitlist for the audiobook!
I mentioned in my review of Dread Nation that Bahni Turpin narrated the audiobook, and as my favorite audiobook narrator, I was hoping she would narrate the sequel.
Dread Nation was told exclusively from the point of view of Jane McKeene, but Deathless Divide alternates POV between Jane and her frenemy, Katherine Devereaux. Katherine is a light-skinned black girl who occasionally passes for white, but attends the same shambler-fighting school as Jane. She tends to quote scripture a lot and remind Jane when she gets in trouble that she brought it on herself. Jane hates Katherine’s goody-two-shoes ways, but Katherine, like Jane, is just trying to survive a brutal world. She just has a different way of making herself feel like she has some control over her life.
Katherine is also much more ladylike than Jane, who doesn’t have time for anything that doesn’t help her kill shamblers and/or get back to her mom. Katherine tries to maintain decorum by using polite manners, avoiding foul language (she’s constantly saying “Jane! Language!” every time Jane swears), and wearing nice, ladylike clothes (including a corset), and keeping her hair neatly done up, as opposed to Jane who can only be bothered with a single braid down her back.
In Dread Nation, we saw Jane constantly giving Katherine grief for always wearing a corset because, honestly, how is one supposed to fight shamblers if you can’t breathe?
Because we get to hear from Katherine herself in Deathless Divide, we come to understand that she has generalized anxiety disorder and the tightness of the corset helps keep the anxiety at bay. She never tells Jane this, but at one point she does taunt Jane by pointing out that she managed to kill several shamblers, on her own, while wearing a corset. I appreciated that a character we saw in the first book as silly and frivolous was given so much more depth in the sequel.
Spoilers lurk beyond this point, so turn back now if you don’t have the stomach for it.
Despite the fact that Jane and Katherine appear to be polar opposites, they become friends in the course of this book, if only because they’re out in the middle of nowhere, having just escaped Summerland, a town that was consumed by shamblers, and now have to find another town to seek shelter before another horde of shamblers finds them. There’s some debate about where they should go next. Jackson wants to try one town, but everyone else wants to go to a different town, so Jackson is outvoted.
Unfortunately for Jackson, he gets attacked by a group of shamblers who ambush him when he’s away from the rest of the group. He manages to kill them, but not before one of them bites him. He says goodbye to his little sister, Lily, and makes Jane promise to protect Lily at all costs before he starts to turn and Jane finally has to kill him. Lily hates Jane for that, but she’s just a kid who’s lost her last family member, so it’s understandable.
They make their way to their destination in California and find that the sheriff is none other than Mr. Redfern, a Native American man who was raised in a school much like Jane’s and is also just doing what he can to survive – which, unfortunately tends to include betraying Jane.
Jane is promptly arrested for the murder of the sheriff of Summerland. I don’t think Jane technically killed him, just left him to get eaten by shamblers, and he would probably have killed Jane and her friends if she hadn’t. But Jane is a black woman in a white world, so she knows how this is going to go down – or at least she thinks she does. Sheriff Redfern assures her that the matter should be cleared up the next day and she should have to spend no more than one night in jail. Jane doesn’t believe him for a second, but it actually turns out the way he said it would. They conduct an investigation (although not a trial, which I find interesting), and find that no one actually witnessed Jane killing the sheriff, so they let her go.
But of course her problems don’t end there. It turns out that Gideon Carr, the white man playing mad scientist with an alleged cure for shamblers, set up shop here after Summerland fell. He had injected Jane with his vaccine (against her will) back in Summerland, so he wants her to testify that the serum is safe and effective so the residents of the town can feel safe. It’s Summerland all over again. Jane points out that she hasn’t actually been bitten by a shambler since she was vaccinated, so no one can say for sure that she’s immune and she’s not going to lie to people just so they can feel safe when they are most certainly not safe.
But Gideon continues to work on his vaccine and inject it into townspeople who are desperate for hope.
Well, surprise, surprise! The town gets overrun by shamblers. Jane and Katherine, along with some other girls from Miss Preston’s that they’ve recently met up with, manage to get the people who can’t fight (including Lily) out safely, but Jane is bit by a shambler in the process. That chapter ends with Jane saying, “and then, I die.” The end.
Except not, because that’s only about half way through the book. A chapter or two later, Jane wakes up in Gideon’s lab because, guess what? His vaccine really did work! He just hasn’t perfected all the variables, notably time – you can’t inject someone with the vaccine and then immediately feed them to a shambler and expect them to survive. You have to give the vaccine time to get to work, but he’s not sure how much time, and in the process of finding out, lots of people (mostly people of color) are dying, and Jane can’t stand for that.
Unfortunately, Jane’s left arm, the arm that sustained the bite, is too far gone and has to be amputated. Gideon skips town before she can recover enough to kill him. A girl named Cassie nurses Jane back to health and then the story skips ahead about a year and a half.
Katherine still thinks Jane is dead and has been wandering around the world (mostly the American continent) with Lily and a few other travelers, getting work where they can, passing Katherine off as white when it’s convenient. Passing makes Katherine understandably uncomfortable, and by the end of the book, she’s decided never to do it again.
Jane and Cassie have been wandering around the country collecting bounties to pay the bills, killing shamblers, hunting Gideon Carr, and sleeping together at night. Cassie is ready to give up on Gideon and move on with their lives, but Jane can’t do that, so Cassie leaves her, taking all Jane’s money with her, just to add insult to injury.
So Jane needs a job like yesterday so she can get some quick cash. A friend of hers points her in the direction of a man who does not have a bounty on his head, but has done some truly terrible things and looks a lot like a guy who does have a bounty on his head. Jane’s not picky anymore (which is another reason Cassie left her), so she goes after him, and in the process, stumbles upon a wagon train heading north to a town called Haven, which is supposedly a town where black people can be truly free. And guess who was hired to help guard the wagon train from shamblers and highwaymen?
That’s right. You knew this book couldn’t end without Jane and Katherine meeting up again. But they’ve both changed (especially Jane), so their reunion is more bitter than sweet, but they’ve been through too much together for anything to break that bond, and pretty soon they’re friends again.
Rather than stay and help guard the wagon, Jane sets off to find Gideon and kill him, and Katherine comes along because she spent a year and a half feeling guilty for letting Jane die once, so she’s not about to let that happen again. Sheriff Redfern comes with them, but he betrays them by leading them right to Gideon, who puts them in a cage and administers the vaccine to Katherine, and for a while it looks like she’s not going to survive the process, even without getting bitten by a shambler.
But Sheriff Redfern double-crosses Gideon by dropping the key to the cage inside the cage so they can just let themselves out, but not before Katherine collapses from the side effects of the vaccine and an accident sets the whole lab on fire. Jane finally gets a chance to kill Gideon, but she has to choose between killing him and saving the one friend she has left. She decides to stay with Katherine, which turns out to be the right choice. Gideon comes back and attacks her, but Katherine shoots him before he can shoot Jane and even manages to make a quip about how she was the “best shot at Miss Preston’s” before passing out.
She’s out for a day or two, but she rallies and they manage to make it to Haven, where Jane is finally reunited with her mother, but her aunt didn’t survive the journey and the reunion turns out to be less than Jane had hoped. Jane is a different person from the girl who was taken from her home, and it turns out her memories of her mother were more rosy than the reality.
After their initial reunion, Jane and her mother avoid each other because it turns out they have nothing to talk about, and while Jane keeps busy by making herself useful around the town, she is no longer the kind of person who can just settle down and live happily ever after. She needs to roam and she needs to kill, so she sets off, but you know Katherine isn’t letting her go off on her own.
Jane doesn’t want Katherine to come because it’s too dangerous and she doesn’t want to lose Katherine, too, but Katherine points out that she is now immune to shambler bites, or at least she will be once she’s actually been bitten (apparently that’s a key variable), so she’s not worried, and she’s as stubborn as Jane, which exasperates Jane, but it’s also why they’re such good friends.
I loved this book so much and I really, really hope Ireland writes another sequel. Please, make it happen!