Wake of Vultures is not a romance (although there’s a romance in it) and it ends on a cliffhanger. Seriously – the characters are left on the edge of a literal cliff. I realize that cliffhangers are a non-starter for many readers, but keep this in mind: Wake of Vultures is also an excellent, gritty, terrifying and fantastical Western about Nettie, who dresses as a boy and who is both bisexual and biracial (African American and Native American). Nettie fights monsters in a magical version of Texas and along the way she also fights internalized sexism and racism. It’s kickass.

At the start of the book, teen-aged Nettie is working for the white man and woman who “adopted” her. She is, for all intents and purposes, their slave. They convince her that she has nowhere else to go and that no one else will accept her because of her race. Nettie doesn’t know anything about her parentage, but because of her appearance she’s assumed to be African American and Native American – one her deep longings is to learn more about where she comes from and what tribe and village she belongs to.

Nettie dresses as a boy both out of a sense of self-preservation and a sense of personal preference. When she gets the chance to run away and work as a wrangler, she adopts the name Nat and embarks on her adventures.

I’ll talk more about how the book handles gender and sexuality later in this review. For now, I just want to note that in this book (and, therefore, in this review) Nettie is referred to as “Nettie” and by female pronouns. The author has stated that in the next book the character will be referred to by male pronouns. The change reflects the character’s evolving feelings about her gender identity (and, should I review the sequel, I’ll be adjusting pronouns in that review to match the usage in the book).

At the very beginning of the book, Nettie fights and kills a vampire. She discovers that unlike most people, she has the ability to see and recognize monsters, even when they are masquerading as human. While she doesn’t have super powers in combat, she is tough and scrappy and resourceful and very good at killing them. She also allies with supernatural beings that promise to help her defeat a particularly terrifying monster, the Cannibal Owl. The book is a dreamlike, imagined version of the West. It feels totally bleak, almost post-apocalyptic, with the Cannibal Owl looming over everyone.

This book is violent and gritty. It includes racism, sexism, rape and threat of rape, death of infants and death of animals. It’s not a light-hearted romp – in fact, it’s so replete with triggers that I never would have read it had I known what I was getting into. And yet it’s also powerful, triumphant, cinematic, satisfying – and surprisingly absorbing considering all that mayhem. Underneath the Buffy-Meets-Pecknipah supernatural violence, this is a coming of age story about a person who learns to value herself and others.

Nettie has internalized an enormous amount of racism and sexism, and she’s had very few opportunities to learn about anything other than basic survival. She hasn’t spent much time with other people. She’s never gone to school. Her initial view of the world is very tiny, and she has always been told that she is the tiniest speck in it. But Nettie always values herself enough to fight for her life, and as the book goes on, other characters and her own experiences challenge her views of the world and her place in it. They suggest that the color of her skin does not make her universally unwanted (or unemployable).

Those experiences also suggest to her that gender is not always binary, and that sex is about more than males and females making babies. Nettie doesn’t have concepts for things like “transgender” or “bisexual” or “gay.” But once she starts to accept the concept of variation, the world opens up for her. She has the chance to consider whether she is attracted to men, or women, or both. She has the chance to consider whether she dresses as a boy for purely practical reasons, or whether she really feels like she actually is a boy. She also starts to accept that being a woman doesn’t always make a person weak or prone to victimization. This is important for many reasons, not the least of which is that it allows her to make her decisions about gender identification without the shadow of fear and self-loathing.

Nettie’s struggles with her many levels of identity are realistically drawn, not only in terms of the place and time in which she lives, and the household in which she grows up, but in terms of her age. She’s a teenager who is going through an identity crisis that is both extraordinary (she kills monsters!) and something totally relatable. By the end of the book, it’s not so much that she’s made any firm decisions about who she is; it’s more that she’s realized the scope of the possibilities before her, which are both exciting and very confusing:

But of course this left her with the question: Where did she fall on the spectrum of stallions and mares? She’d been drawn to Hennessy ever since she’d known him, but her skin had tingled and flopped when Dan had held the bow around her, even though she didn’t take a shine to him. And when Winifred had stood, all wet and nekkid, in the creek, Nettie couldn’t stop staring. Could a mare only like mares or stallions, or could a mare like whoever she damn pleased? Maybe she just didn’t know enough yet to understand what she was or what she wanted. Or maybe she was a lot of things, just as her skin was a mixture of browns. Maybe she didn’t have to like anything.

This book succeeds because Nettie is such a compelling character. Nettie is incredibly vibrant, prickly, compelling, flawed, exciting, and interesting. She feels like a real person, with a real personality and hopes and dreams and confused feelings and agendas. She’s incredibly interesting not only because of her unusual racial situation (which, in the Old West, wasn’t actually very unique but has been under-represented in fiction) nor in her genderqueer status, nor in her ability to hunt monsters. She’s compelling because all her experiences and aspects of her personality and her sharp mind come together to create a complex person who you just have to root for.

If you’re interested in other “Weird West” books, io9.com did an interview with multiple authors in the genre that’s informative and interesting. I can personally vouch for Silver on the Road, by Laura Anne Gilman, as a fantastic book. Wake of Vultures is set very much in the author’s imagination, with not much sense of place other than a dusty bleakness. Laura Anne Gilman travelled the West extensively, and it shows in her finely crafted book – another, but very different, coming of age story about a young woman who fights monsters. Both have similar concepts and very high quality, and it’s fascinating to see how different the two books are despite their similarities, which include a focus on empowerment and growth. I’m so excited to see the Weird West sub-genre expand as writers continue to, as Lila Bowen says, “flip the tables” on the standard tropes.