Week 12: Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse (5)

 The past becomes the future is I guess the idea here. And Rebecca Roanhorse brings in a perspective I've never considered and am the better for reading. I actually found it extremely reassuring that the end of the world is a natural process that's happened before. Sure it's chaotic and violent, but that's what change is as it's happening all at once; it eventually settles. Peace returns. People adapt, and stories are passed down.

And that's basically why we tell stories, write books and watch movies. We have things we can learn about ourselves and our lives from the experiences of those before us and those different from us. The current market of port-apocalypse young and new adult fiction is distinctly lacking the tradition and pathos of Trail of Lightning. The best post-apocalypse story I've ever read was Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel, and it is the other kind of return to tradition. It follows the intersection of lives as touched by art and literature, in a return to the nomadic roots of traveling performers. Art and tradition thrive in the bleakness of tragedy and within the darkest corners of the human soul, because humans are strong and that is how connect with each other, how we process and work through the times. We persevere as we always have and always will, our past - be it as an individual, as part of a tribe, or as part of a profession - carries us.

You don't see many stories about people just being happy, and that isn't to suggest that no one is ever carried off the sheer joy of a thing. Rather it's because we don't linger over it - it is there within all the pain and wallowing of a life, and you must work to extract it like the meat of a nut. But not everyone does, and not everyone can.

Throughout reading Trail of Lightning, I couldn't help but feel that this was a myth in the making, that Maggie's story would be passed down like those of Neizghání and Ma'ii's exploits. She is adapting, she is surviving, and her story contains a moral. She is on a journey of achieving a peace and happiness for others to learn from by example, as others have, and others will.

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