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Grab the ebook of Killer of Enemies by Joseph Bruchac for the special price of $1.99 through the end of May. Winner of the American Indian Youth Literature Award and one of YALSA's Top 10 Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Readers.
"Starts fast, gets faster and never touches the brakes. A mind-bending fantasy that smashes across genre lines to tell a story about survival, courage, and lots of monsters. Joseph Bruchac brings serious game." --Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Fire & Ash and Extinction Machine
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Killer of Enemies by Joseph Bruchac
Summery:
Years ago, seventeen-year-old Apache hunter Lozen and her family lived in a world of haves and have-nots. There were the Ones—people so augmented with technology and genetic enhancements that they were barely human—and there was everyone else who served them.
Then the Cloud came, and everything changed. Tech stopped working. The world plunged back into a new steam age. The Ones’ pets—genetically engineered monsters—turned on them and are now loose on the world.
Lozen was not one of the lucky ones pre-C, but fate has given her a unique set of survival skills and magical abilities. She hunts monsters for the Ones who survived the apocalyptic events of the Cloud, which ensures the safety of her kidnapped family. But with every monster she takes down, Lozen’s powers grow, and she connects those powers to an ancient legend of her people. It soon becomes clear to Lozen that she is not just a hired gun.
As the legendary Killer of Enemies was in the ancient days of the Apache people, Lozen is meant to be a more than a hunter. Lozen is meant to be a hero.
My Review:
The historical Lozen:
(c. 1840-1890) was a skilled warrior and a prophetess of the Chihenne Chiricahua Apache. She was the sister of Victorio, a prominent chief. Born into the Chihenne band during the late 1840s,
Lozen was, according to legends, able to use her powers in battle to learn the movements of the enemy. Victorio said, "Lozen is my right hand ... strong as a man, braver than most, and cunning in strategy. Lozen is a shield to her people"
In the 1870s, Victorio and his band of Apaches were moved to the deplorable conditions of the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona. He and his followers left the reservation around 1877 and began marauding and raiding, all while evading capture by the military. Lozen fought beside Victorio when he and his followers rampaged against Americans who had appropriated their homeland around west New Mexico's Black Mountain.
As the band fled American forces, Lozen inspired women and children, frozen in fear, to cross the surging Rio Grande. "I saw a magnificent woman on a beautiful horse—Lozen, sister of Victorio. Lozen the woman warrior!", remembers James Kaywaykla, a child at the time, riding behind his grandmother. "High above her head she held her rifle. There was a glitter as her right foot lifted and struck the shoulder of her horse. He reared, then plunged into the torrent. She turned his head upstream, and he began swimming."
Immediately, the other women and the children followed her into the torrent. When they reached the far bank of the river, cold and wet but alive, Lozen came to Kaywaykla’s grandmother. "You take charge, now", she said. "I must return to the warriors", who stood between their women and children and the onrushing cavalry. Lozen drove her horse back across the wild river and returned to her comrades.
According to Kaywaykla, "She could ride, shoot, and fight like a man, and I think she had more ability in planning military strategy than did Victorio." He also remembers Victorio saying, "I depend upon Lozen as I do Nana" (the aging patriarch of the band).
Late in Victorio’s campaign, Lozen left the band to escort a new mother and her newborn infant across the Chihuahuan Desert from Mexico to the Mescalero Apache Reservation, away from the hardships of the trail.
Equipped with only a rifle, a cartridge belt, a knife, and a three-day supply of food, she set out with the mother and child on a perilous journey through territory occupied by Mexican and U.S. Cavalry forces. En route, afraid that a gunshot would betray their presence, she used her knife to kill a longhorn, butchering it for the meat.
She stole a Mexican cavalry horse for the new mother, escaping through a volley of gunfire. She then stole a vaquero’s horse for herself, disappearing before he could give chase. She also acquired a soldier’s saddle, rifle, ammunition, blanket and canteen, and even his shirt. Finally, she delivered her charges to the reservation.
There, she learned that Mexican and Tarahumara Indian forces under Mexican commander Joaquin Terrazas had ambushed Victorio and his band at Tres Castillos, three stony hills in northeastern Chihuahua.
According to Stephen H. Lekson in his monograph Nana's Raid: Apache Warfare in Southern New Mexico, 1881, Terrazas, on October 15, 1880, "surprised the Apaches, and in the boulders of Tres Castillos, Victorio’s warriors fought their last fight. Apache tradition holds that Victorio fell on his own knife rather than die at the hands of the Mexicans.
Almost all the warriors at Tres Castillos were killed, and many women died fighting; the older people were shot, while almost one hundred young women and children were taken for slaves. Only a few escaped."
Knowing the survivors would need her, Lozen immediately left the Mescalero Reservation and rode alone southwest across the desert, threading her way undetected through U.S. and Mexican military patrols. She rejoined the decimated band in the Sierra Madre (in northwestern Chihuahua), now led by the 74-year-old patriarch Nana.
According to Kimberly Moore Buchanan's book Apache Women Warriors, Lozen fought beside Nana and his handful of warriors in his two-month long bloody campaign of vengeance across southwestern New Mexico in 1881. Just before the fighting began, Nana said of Lozen, "Though she is a woman, there is no warrior more worthy than the sister of Victorio."
Lozen also fought beside Geronimo after his breakout from the San Carlos reservation in 1885, in the last campaign of the Apache wars. With the band pursued relentlessly, she used her power to locate their enemies—the U.S. and Mexican cavalries. According to Alexander B. Adams in his book Geronimo, "she would stand with her arms outstretched, chant a prayer to Ussen, the Apaches’ supreme deity, and slowly turn around." Lozen's prayer is translated in Eve Ball's book In the Days of Victorio:
"By the sensation she felt in her arms, she could tell where the enemy was and how many they numbered", Adams writes.
- Upon this earth
- On which we live
- Ussen has Power
- This Power is mine
- For locating the enemy.
- I search for that Enemy
- Which only Ussen the Great
- Can show to me.
According to Laura Jane Moore in the book Sifters, Native American Women's Lives: In 1885 Geronimo and Naiche fled their reservation with 140 followers including Lozen after rumors began circulating that their leaders were to be imprisoned at Alcatraz Island.
Lozen and Dahteste began negotiating peace treaties. One of which was that the Apache leaders would be imprisoned for two years then would have their freedom. The
Americans leaders dismissed the peace treaty and Lozen and Dahteste continued to negotiate. The Apache rebels believed they had strong resolve until it was revealed all the Chiricahuas had been rounded up and sent to Florida. If they wanted to rejoin their kin, the Apache needed to head east. The Apache warriors agreed to surrender and laid down their arms. Five days later they were train bound to Florida.
Taken into U. S. military custody after Geronimo’s final surrender, Lozen traveled as a prisoner of war to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama.
Like many other imprisoned Apache warriors, she died in confinement of tuberculosis sometime after 1887. Nevertheless, her life was noted as a validation of the respected place women held among the Apaches.
WELL.... our heroine didn't shame her name sack - She’s brave, tough, knows how to kick ass, and is impressively smart and resourceful. She’s also observant, levelheaded, and completely devoted to her family. I just fell in love with this tall ( above 6"), lanky, quite female.(as the author said - “The female of species is deadlier than the male.”).
Yes, she don't talk much, but her thoughts fill the space with dry cynical humor which I liked very much and in this I find myself chuckle loudly - especially with the episode of the "super snake.." J
Lozen fully embraces and honors her Apache heritage. Much of her resourcefulness stems from her utilization of knowledge, skills, and customs passed down to her by her ancestors. But her skills and background as a fighter doesn’t draw only upon some mystical sense of heritage, but because her father and her uncle were lifelong military brass and passed on their knowledge of top-grade weaponry as well as their cultural beliefs to Lozen.
Noteworthy aspect of the book that I enjoyed is its emphasis on family. Too often in YA fiction, the main protagonist’s family is either completely killed off or villianized in order to angstify the melodrama and to enable the young MC to do things most teenagers would never be able to do. Worst yet, there are numerous instances when the YA heroine pretty much abandons her family (as well as her friends, interests, and aspirations) the instant some hot stranger pops into her life to profess his predestined, undying love for her. She takes great pride in her relatives (both those still living and those she’s lost). And that never changes even when a love interest is introduced into the story.
The Background of the plot: First it was the virus that wiped out all the horses in the world. Then it was the Cloud, that took care of technology and killed most of the "altered" or "enhanced" humans. Unfortunately, those with only partial body tech survived. Cities are death traps, but the wilderness is little better. It also meant that many of the former ruling classes, most of whom had electronic physical enhancements, died. As Lozen recalled, “The most important men and women who chaired the three great corporate nation-states of New America, Euro-Russia, and Afro-Asia all perished painfully, quickly, and dramatically."
Four of them are the Ones (The Jester, The Dreamer, The Time Mistress and Diablica Loco - all them have mask covered faces to hide the parts that they have no more), in control of Haven, prison to Lozen and her family. Her father and uncle died in the attack on their hidden valley by Haven soldiers.
Haven is somewhere in the former Southwest - and here there is another thing that J It also remind those time that suddenly you reach to a water source - the smell and the humidity and the crispiness of the plants.
In the dystopian society of Haven, all the electronic devices have stopped working post Cloud. Haven is very basic living society. They have limited communication such as runners or carrier birds, no means of rapid transportation, and there is a limited food and water supply.
In addition, all of the Gemods, or genetically modified creatures that filled the pleasure parks of the powerful, were no longer confined by electric fences. They ran free and terrorized populations. Safety was found only behind large guarded walls, like the former penitentiary now serving, involuntarily, as the home of Lozen and her family.
Lozen, is the monster hunter employed by the four rulers of Haven, the Ones. Sent out regularly on missions, the only thing that keeps her coming back are her family hostages, mother, younger sister and brother. She hunts and kills in the manner of her ancestors, making sure to respect her enemies and asking the creature’s spirit for forgiveness for taking its life. Lozen is no girly-girl. After a kill, she cuts out the heart, says a few old Chiricahua words, and eats it raw. She lives by the variation of the Chiricahua variation of the Twenty-third Psalm taught to her by her murdered Uncle Chatto:
Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Death
I will fear no evil
for a I am the meanest son of a bitch
in this whole damn valley.”
However, while she goes out on these missions for the Ones, she also is scouting out the area so that she can find a place for her and her family to go when she has figured out a way to escape.
Lozen has several advantages though, about which the Ones are ignorant. The first is that she has recently developed the ability to read thoughts. It doesn’t always happen, but started not long after the cloud arrived, and has served her well, facilitating her survival. A second is that she can sometimes communicate with ancient Native spirits. They help her and guide her.
There's also gentle, musical Hussein, a young Bedouin gardener who has find a place in her heart, and who she must also be rescued. The other characters were well done - ranging from her sweet sister and brothers, her wise and caring mother, to the sadistic guards and Ones.
The chance comes when one of the four helps her escape, followed up by the assistance of a mystical Bigfoot creature who has been communicating with her telepathically. The final battle against the most evil of the tyrannical Ones had me on the edge of my seat.
Highly Recommended!!!
J
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