by Stacey Lee
An OK book that I'm rounding up to four because the characters and historical perspectives are so underrepresented in other books, not to mention other YA or other Westerns. At the same time, I wasn't in love with this book, and I hope it paves the way for bigger and better ones.
Unfortunately, it was pretty obvious Andy's brother was a Broken Hand Gang member: Lee hammers Chekhov's Gun hard. I liked that Andy pushes back on Sammy's Broken Hand obsession---just because they're both Black doesn't mean that they're related! Sammy meets Badge and the Broken Hand subplot temporarily becomes something else---a story about the unjustness of the law and of slavery, and about Sammy's expanded view of the world. To go back on that at the very end, in a sequence that doesn't quite make plot sense (how does Andy suddenly know where Harp Falls is, way off the beaten path, when the entire problem was that she had no idea where to find it and it wasn't on their map? why didn't Isaac recognize Andy before?) is a letdown.