Should you read Sisters of the Lost Nation?
What works
I liked how firmly the book puts Anna in a place she knows. The casino makes the reservation feel busy and unfamiliar at the same time, and the older stories tell her things the casino's visitors would never think to ask about.
What may not work for you
The search shares the book with Anna's coming of age and with stories that reach back before the disappearances. The mystery has more room for those detours than a tightly procedural investigation would.
What is Sisters of the Lost Nation about?
Seventeen-year-old Anna Horn has reasons to look over her shoulder even before she tries to explain the presence that follows her at night. She gets bullied, and the people visiting her reservation's new casino can make her feel out of place in her own home. When girls begin disappearing from Takoda and Anna's younger sister Grace goes missing, the things Anna notices start to matter in a different way.
What Anna notices
Anna pays attention to changes adults have learned to live with. In one early passage she notices frogs turning up dead on newly paved roads. She can see why people take pride in the work and still wonder what gets lost under the asphalt. That ability to hold two thoughts at once makes her a good person to follow through a mystery where everyone is trying to settle on one explanation.
Grace gives that attention a direction. In the campfire opening, younger Grace is occupied with her snack while Anna listens to their uncle tell a frightening story. The ordinary detail makes them feel like sisters before the disappearance asks Anna to think about what she might have missed.
The story at the campfire
An old account of a burial disturbed and a head that came back hungry gives Anna a way to think about the thing she fears. Her uncle ties the story to Miss Shelby, a keeper of stories Anna trusted. That association helps explain why Anna goes back to stories other people might dismiss. She is trying to understand something that happened to a person she knew.
Takoda beyond the casino
The hotel and casino bring money and visitors, and the book gives people on Takoda different reasons to welcome or worry about the change. The reservation is fictional. Medina draws on more than one influence in imagining it, and Anna's interest in what Miss Shelby taught her belongs to this community and this story.
The missing girls
The girls in the novel are fictional. Their disappearances touch a real crisis affecting Indigenous women and girls. Medina gives that subject weight through Anna's attention to the people around her and through Grace's place in the Horn family. The possibility of something supernatural adds a fear to the search. It doesn't settle how people in the community or the people who come to it treat these girls.
The mystery takes its time
Some of the early suspense comes from returning to moments before the search for Grace. That leaves room for Anna's friendships, fears and habits to matter before they become evidence. Anyone looking for a straight investigation will spend more time getting to know Anna and Takoda than the premise alone suggests. Medina returns to the same reservation with another family in Indian Burial Ground.
Final thoughts
The casino held my attention from the beginning. It puts the people who live on Takoda and the people who come there for an evening in the same place, with very different ideas about what they owe one another. That makes Anna's insistence on paying attention count. The Sisters of the Lost Nation reading list follows that mix of family, memory and supernatural unease into six other stories.