November 1, 2022
Bullied by classmates, Anna Horn must also put up with condescending visitors at her reservation's casino. But she has worse things on her mind: the reservation is being stalked by some unknown horror, and girls (including her little sister) are rapidly disappearing. Now Anna must act to counter evils old and new threatening those around her. A debut from Medina, of Louisiana's Tunica-Biloxi Tribe; with a 55,000-copy first printing.
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March 1, 2023
Anna Horn is a senior in high school who works part time cleaning the VIP suites at the casino hotel on her Louisiana reservation. But when several young women go missing from the reservation--including, eventually, her sister Grace--Anna realizes that their disappearances are connected to men she's seen going in and out of one of those suites. As she tries everything she can to find Grace, Anna is convinced that she's being pursued by a horror from a tribal myth. The plot moves between the time before and after Grace's disappearance, building tension as Anna puts the pieces together. The author, a member of the Tunica-Biloxi Nation, drew on the stories, traditions, and beliefs of numerous Native cultures to develop the Takoda Nation. As she investigates the disappearances, Anna is also trying to figure out her place in her tribe and what it means to be a Two Spirit individual. Recommend to readers of contemporary Native writers such as Stephen Graham Jones, Cherie Dimaline, Erika T. Wurth, and Tommy Orange. The novel may also appeal to readers of nonfiction such as Highway of Tears, by Jessica McDiarmid (2019).
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March 13, 2023
Who’s responsible for the disappearance of members of Louisiana’s Takoda tribe? That question, inspired by the real-life epidemic of disappearances of Native Americans in both the U.S. and Canada, drives the plot of Medina’s pulse-pounding debut. Anna Horn, one of the few from the Takoda reservation to attend high school in the nearby town, is routinely subject to bullying and harassment. Anna is also troubled by the disappearance several months earlier of 19-year-old best friends Erica Landry and Amber Bloom, who also lived on the reservation. She’s skeptical that the teens just ran off, and fears their fate is linked to an older mystery: 10 years earlier, Shelby Mire, “the last of the Takoda tribe’s official singers and Legend Keepers,” was murdered, an unsolved crime that still haunts the surviving tribe members. Then, after someone else close to Anna vanishes, she searches frantically for answers, unsure whether the disappearances are linked to a new casino that the police suspected would attract riffraff or if something supernatural is at play. Medina resolves the plot well and gracefully weaves real-life concerns about disappearing Native people into the whodunit plot. This author is off to a strong start. Agent: Amanda Orozco, Transatlantic Agency.