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.

It has the tropes of the genre : a tired detective in a metropolis he doesn't quite know, powerful men, booze and prohibition, sleazy journalists, and of course, melancholia, jazz and femmes fatales. But the rest is a very smart departure in an alternate history: what if the smallpox brought to America was a non-lethal variant? The Native community would be thriving, along the Mississippi, it would have a city and a state built on their power and syncretic beliefs. That's Cahokia, where the delicate balance that holds it all is threatened by a gruesome murder. It's a book that takes you in, and embraces you and makes you believe that Cahokia is real and pulsating, on the right bank of the Mississippi.

Ultimately, the novel was unsatisfying, but not in the way that comes from careless writing or a lack of vision on the part of the writer. Rather, it's unsatisfying in the same way that life is--you understand why it has to be that way, and although you often wish things could be different, you can't help but glory in the moments that were given.

I don't want a movie of this, I want a video game where the player gets to explore the city of Cahokia. Through it, we get to see the author's vision of Indigenous cultures entering the 20th century but on their own terms. It's colorful, adventurous, brutal, brazen - perfect setting for a politically charged noir murder mystery.

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.

A tad overstuffed, but (because of this?) succeeds as (all of) hardboiled noir, speculative anthropology, and cathartic routing of white supremacy, which is no small accomplishment. Could have done with a more low-key ending, in my opinion, for some light and shade, but superb writing and characterisation throughout, with more than a few lines that elicited audibly-impressed noises. This alt-history nerd left happy.