Book Pairing: Bad Cree and Greywaren

My new thing for 2023 is that I’m going to do book pairings.¹ I have been meaning to do this for ages, because it always seems like I have pairs of books on my TBR list with thematic resonances or similar premises, and I always intend to (but don’t) read them both together to see what that gets me. Well, 2023 is my year! I may not be doing much of anything this year, and my main accomplishment for the year may be that I survived it and bought a Steam Deck² but BY GOD, I am going to pair up some motherfucking books this year and you will EXPERIENCE THE RESULTS.

I’m extremely tickled by this first pairing (it is actually my second pairing, but I didn’t write about Birnam Wood and The Survivalists fast enough after finishing them, and now they are fading from my mind because I am one entire stupid little goldfishy), of two books where people can pull real things out of dreams. Greywaren is the final book in Maggie Stiefvater’s Dreamers trilogy, which follows the adventures of the Lynch brothers from the Raven Boys quartet (which I loved), most notably Ronan Lynch, who can dream of specific things and then bring them back to the real world when he awakens. It all has something to do with ley lines and something to do with other worlds and something to do with the fact that his boyfriend has gone off to Harvard and left him behind. Jessica Johns’s Bad Cree tells the story of a Cree woman called Mackenzie who has begun to have unsettlingly vivid dreams of her dead sister Sabrina. And when she wakes up, she has brought pieces of the dream back with her.

Jessica Johns (Sucker Creek First Nation) wrote Bad Cree in part because a white male writing instructor had told the class never to write about their dreams, and Johns resolved to “write a story about dreams that validate them in all their beauty and wonder and knowledge” (source). This is an A+ origin story, number one. B of all, it would be hard to deny the power of Johns’s chosen opening image: Mackenzie wakes up from her dream with a severed crow’s head in her hand. It came back with her to the waking world from a horribly vivid dream about finding her sister’s body with a gaping, bloody hole where Sabrina’s heart should be. Terrified by the sudden intrusion of her dreams into the waking world — and the fact that she is being followed by crows for some reason? — Mackenzie makes the difficult decision to travel back home to be with her family, who have their own stories to tell about dreams and the so-called real world.

As the name of the Raven Boys series implies, corvids have always been a staple of the two book series that culminate in Greywaren. One of the first ways Ronan revealed his dream power to his friends was by introducing them to a dream raven called Chainsaw (great name for a corvid), and we continue to catch glimpses of Chainsaw, and other characters beloved from the Raven Cycle series, throughout the Dreamers trilogy. Greywaren concludes the latter trilogy, bringing the Lynch brothers and the many, mannnnnyyyyy other characters back together to save the world from a prophesied world-ending fire. It’s maybe the least bringing-things-back-from-dreams-y book in this entire seven-book series, in part because the prior book shut down the power for dreamers to do that, and in part because Ronan Lynch is spiritually trapped in a sort of liminal dream/otherworld space.

The trouble I’ve had with the Dreamers trilogy overall is that it contains too many characters who stray too far afield of each other. If you came here from the Raven Cycle (which the trilogy pretty heavily assumes that you did), you’ll miss those characters; whether you did or didn’t, you’ll probably spend a certain amount of time sulking about the ratio of how much we’re asking to care about Ronan’s relationship with Adam to how much screen time that relationship actually gets in the course of the series. Maggie Stiefvater remains superb at writing spiky, specific characters, but there were so many of them in this series having so many different adventures that the best I can say is that by the end of book 3 I felt genuinely fond of some of them. The moments when the series sparked to life were those when the characters were in each other’s lives and in each other’s faces, making messes up close instead of in far-flung locations up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

(I don’t really have a very strong grasp on what is comprehended in the term “Eastern Seaboard,” nor have I ever not once had a strong grasp on the geography of any fictional book or real-world place, ever. If I have made a mistake here, I apologize, but please know that mistakes of this type are inevitable for me.)

The core beauty of Bad Cree, a book I will heretofore be advertising to people as an indigenous readalike to Practical Magic the movie (I’ve never read the book), is that Jessica Johns fully understands the necessity of getting all her characters in the same room. When Mackenzie starts having her unsettling dreams, she immediately brings it to her friend and cousin Jory, and they advise her to repair to her family home posthaste to work through the problem with the support of her aunts, her cousin, and her surviving sister. Mackenzie soon realizes that she’s not the only family member whose dreams are imbued with particular power and foreknowledge, a fact that each of her relatives has held close throughout her life, only revealing it now that Mackenzie has opened the door to that sharing. As a family, they’re able to approach the problem of Mackenzie’s haunted dreams, and start finding ways to solve it; things chiefly go wrong when they fail to trust or confide in one another.

Some of the cousins and aunts don’t quite spring to vivid life in the same way as the central three sisters (our protagonist, her late sister Sabrina, and Sabrina’s twin, Tracey), but what’s flawless in every detail is Johns’s evocation of Mackenzie’s home and family. Bad Cree is packed with these gorgeous sensory details — the sound a can of coins makes when you shake it; the way an old couch tips everyone sitting on it toward the center; the lingering smell of cigarette smoke in a bar that hasn’t allowed smoking for years — that flawlessly evoke both the safety Mackenzie felt with her family growing up, and the ways in which her family’s lives have been informed by trauma and historical disenfranchisement.

Perhaps to nobody’s surprise, the evil that haunts Mackenzie has its roots in that very disenfranchisement. That Mackenzie can only fight it by drawing on the power and wisdom of her community might have felt overly allegorical in the hands of a less talented writer. Here it just feels inevitable. Johns writes about Mackenzie’s Cree family with such obvious love and respect, but she doesn’t avoid the painful colonial legacies that have threaded trauma, addiction, and premature death through the fabric of the community. Defeating the present evil is necessary, and satisfying, but it cannot go back in time to restore Sabrina to them, or heal any of the other ills their nation has suffered through the years.

Maggie Stiefvater has an equally obvious love for her characters, but not to quite such good effect. The first two books in the series sprung most vividly to life in scenes between characters I had an existing stake in (i.e., the ones who carried over from the prior series). The same is broadly true in Greywaren, although I was beginning to care about new characters enough to be invested in different sets of them being shuffled around and into each other’s lives. It’s just… this is the third book in the series! It is too late for me to begin to find it interesting for Ronan to see how Declan is with Jordan. As in Bad Cree, the evil in Greywaren can only be defeated through everyone’s combined efforts. They also have to choose to be the best version of themselves, the most capable, the most expansive, the most idealistic. It’s a lovely conclusion that would have landed with much more oomph if most of the characters hadn’t been separated from each other for most of the series. We cannot all be Tolkien!! Nobody likes that half of The Two Towers anyway!!!³

The conclusions I have drawn from this book pairing are below:

• Corvids are dream creatures.
• Together we stand, divided we fall.
• Read Bad Cree! It’s excellent and weird and creepy, and I can’t wait to read more by this author!
• Read the Raven Cycle! It is excellenter than this sequel series.

Coda: If crows were suddenly following you around, what would you do about it? I would bring them presents so that they’d want to be my friends. I have always wanted a crow friend. I would go to some lengths to avoid having a crow enemy.