Preternatura Books Club: Native Americans in Urban Fantasy

Welcome back to the Preternatura Book Club! We'll be talking about topics that are related to the book we're reading but are general enough for you to pipe up and voice an opinion.

Each book read will last four weeks, which is a much faster schedule than we've done on previous books. Today, we tackle the next few chapters of SKINWALKER, book one in the Jane Yellowrock series by Faith Hunter.

Today’s giveaway will be a mystery unclaimed prize of your choice of genre: paranormal romance, urban fantasy, sci fi, fantasy, or YA. I’ll check to make sure you don’t have the book I pick so you’re guaranteed of getting something you don’t already have.

First, let me get my regular New Orleans complaint out of the way. There were a couple of things that I let slide, but I have to complain about the NOPD’s Officer Herbert. He makes a big deal of telling Jane his name is pronounced “A=bear.” Except that, no, it wouldn’t be. HERBERT would be pronounced “HER-BERT.” It’s the name HEBERT (no R in the first syllable) that is pronounced “A-BEAR.” Hebert (not Herbert) is a common name in Louisiana. Sorry, but stuff like that drives me nuts. If there hadn’t been several lines of dialogue specifically telling Jane how to incorrectly pronounce the name Herbert, I wouldn’t thought a thing about it.  So okay, got that out of my system.

The interesting things to me as I read this chapter is the Native American connection (in this case, Cherokee), and how Jane tracks the rogue vampire to the home of an Elder (who lives at the edge of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park, no less!), and begins to have some flashbacks to the childhood she can’t remember.

I think Native Americans are often portrayed in urban fantasy as mystical or having powers. Mercy Thompson is an obvious comparison, and she’s a skinwalker as Jane Yellowrock is. In my Penton Legacy series, I have two characters, a child vampire named Hvresse, or Hannah, and Glory Cummings, who are descended from the Muscogee Creek tribe and who both have powers. (I live about twenty miles from the site of the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, sort of the last gasp of the great Creek War, and this area was part of the Muscogee Creek lands.) Can you think of other series that have Native American characters, and do they have supernatural powers?

And as someone pointed out in last week’s post, this book is unusual (to me at least) in that Jane and her Beast are separate entities inhabiting the same body. She doesn’t so much turn into Beast when she shifts, but agrees to step back and let Beast take the forefront, so they have separate trains of thought that exist simultaneously. I really like this aspect, and it’s why giving Beast a point of view works so well.

Leo! I hope Leo becomes a major character in this series, because I’ve already found him very, very interesting. He has that whole evil-sexy imperious vampire thing going on, and appears to be the master vampire of New Orleans. So I assume Jane is going to have quite a bit of interaction with Leo. Those of you who are fans of this series, do you like Leo or hate Leo? I kind of get a Trent Kalamack vibe from him, to pull a character from another favorite series—essentially a bad guy, only maybe not all the time.

Share your thoughts on SKINWALKER to enter for the book drawing! Next week, we’ll continue with the next few chapters. I’m not reading as fast on this one as I’d hoped because of my own deadlines but I still hope to get through it by mid-October to keep the book club on schedule. The reading schedule for the book club can now be found on the righthand column of the blog page.