Katherine is also a rule follower and lover of fashion.
Jane is darker skinned and rebellious, while Katherine is fair skinned to the point where she could pass for white. They are both outstanding fighters, but the similarities end there. Ireland’s main characters, Jane McKeene and Katherine Deveraux, are two teens attending Miss Preston’s School of Combat for Negro Girls. In this world young black women train as fighters so as to work as “attendants” to rich white women, guarding them from shamblers and any other unwanted advances. While officially slavery is no more, in fact Black people bear the burden of defending white communities from the undead and remain segregated and dehumanized. A new kind of war grips the nation as the ranks of the undead grow and threaten the east coast, yet at the same time, the racism that enabled slavery remains and influences politics, economics and basic safety. At the Battle of Gettysburg, the war ended when the battlefield dead rose up as zombies or shamblers, forcing Union and Rebel soldiers to work together against the undead.
In these novels, Justina Ireland imagines the US in the period immediately following the Civil War but with a strange twist. I read and reviewed Dread Nation a couple of years ago but felt that I needed to do a re-read to refresh my memory before starting book 2 - Deathless Divide.
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