Dispossessed by Piper Mejia

IFWG Publishing Australia (2021)

ISBN: 978-1-925956-83-2

Available:  Paperback, Kindle edition ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

Dispossessed is a character-driven debut YA novel from New Zealand author Piper Mejia.

With unusual traits and a rapidly changing physical presence, sixteen-year–old foster child Slate is a perpetual loner who is used to rejection. When Malice, a woman claiming to be from social services, picks him up to take him to another home he isn’t surprised. But when she reveals she is taking him to his grandfather in New Zealand, he is introduced to a band of strangers living a nomadic lifestyle, and possibilities for a life he never imagined. There Slate finds a diverse group of people with unique traits and surprising abilities: people who are supposedly his kin.

Like Slate, no one understands Warnner, an institutionalized boy with a history of abandonment. When Warnner finds the community Slate has recently joined, he is intrigued and drawn to the people running it, because of the uncanny traits they appear to share with him. Unlike Slate’s restless distrust, Warnner’s interest in joining is almost immediate, and conflict brews between the two. The community’s world and way of life is soon pitted against a group of fanatics out to hunt, violate, and destroy them, forcing rivalries into the background as tense and tentative cooperation among the dispossessed becomes required for the community’s survival.

At times poignant, this tale is driven by rich cast of characters and a strong sense of place.  Mejia centers otherness and relies on the surreal in this carefully constructed society, using some Māori terminology, but with a minimal presence of the indigenous population. Instead, Mejia addresses marginalization as experienced by this community of outsiders, the dispossessed, and builds an intricate world where misfits find community and individual variances do not impose limits so much as they open doors to alternatives. A vividly imagined YA fantasy about kinship, community, and the differences that make people who they are, Dispossessed may resonate with readers of varied backgrounds who have felt alienated or misunderstood. Recommended for ages 13-18 who enjoyed the work of Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper and The Stars Never Rise by Rachel Vincent.

Contains: violence, torture, violence directed at the dispossessed, a marginalized group.

Reviewed by E.F. Schraeder

Key words New Zealand. YA. Urban Fantasy. Fantasy.