Sisters of the Lost Nation

 Sisters of the Lost Nation by Nick Medina, 352 pages.

Anna Horn has plenty of worries. She's constantly bullied at school, her parents' marriage is falling apart, her little sister is growing away from her, her boss at the reservation's casino is sketchy, and when she walks alone she often sees the ghostly severed head her uncle told her about as a little girl. That's all before teenage girls start going missing. Due to some thorny (and all too real) jurisdiction problems surrounding law enforcement on reservations, it is hard to pursue the investigation of these cases, and easier to pretend that the girls all just ran off. So when Anna's little sister joins the missing she throws everything she has into finding her herself, following leads and tribal legends both in an attempt to bring her sister home.

This was more thriller than the horror I think I was expecting, but it was quite good. I found Anna to be an engaging protagonist and the story to be haunting, not only narratively but also in reality. Medina notes at the end that Indigenous women are staggeringly more likely to be murdered or go missing than any other demographic (about 12 times more likely in fact). This book is fiction, but it is obviously very invested in dealing with real world problems. My one major criticism is that I'm not sure the structure Medina decided to use worked very well. Chapters jump back and forth between before and after Anna's sister goes missing, and I found that they really interrupted the narrative tension. There would be very high intensity investigations, and then suddenly we were spending chapters concerned with our clothes and parents marital problems. It also doesn't help that the way we differentiate is by numbering the days at the top of the chapter, which is a little bit too subtle, especially close to where the timelines are meeting up. That being said, I do consider this a pretty strong first novel and would recommend it.