Cahokia Jazz

This book does so many things, and all outstandingly. It's a portrait of a Cahokia that in our timeline was never allowed to exist. It's a noir detective thriller. It's an intense character study of a deeply relatable protagonist. It's a love poem to 1920s jazz--the music and the cultural space it created.

I'm having difficulty actually talking about it coherently without massive spoilers. So just go on and read this book.

An alternative history where the Native American Cahokia Nation was not wiped out by disease from white explorers and settlers, and went on to thrive. It takes place in the 1920s and it's very noir-esque. While it is a detective story that does come together nicely, it is more of a character piece. There are so many well developed characters and the fleshing out of the Cahokia people overall is easily believable.

Now this was just endlessly entertaining. Alternate history liberally sprinkled with jazz, linguistics, power structures, hardboiled detectives and some really neat worldbuilding, that's just a great way to start the reading year. Is it THE most indepth, hard-hitting look at race and class relations in the (OK, a) US? No. But it uses its narrative and the world it creates to create a utopia of what might be without making it all too simple. I'm sure you can ask whether a white Brit is the one who should be telling this story, but it IS a world that never got to be, so nobody's lived in it; just the ones who read this story. And it's a story that keeps finding new stones to turn over. Cue up a good prohibition-era playlist, pour yourself a gimlet and dig in.