"Seventh City" by Emily Hayse

Seventh City is a magical realism story based in a fictional world similar to the Pacific Northwest/Alaska back in Old West days.  It's about a native tribe and some Invaders, basically fantasy versions of Inuits and white people.  The story centers around Maki, a young teen girl whose older brother Tsanu gets captured by the Invaders.  Tsanu is her only caretaker, since their parents are gone, and Maki wants to rescue him.  Tsanu agrees to lead the Invader captain to a fabled seventh city of fabulous wealth far to the north, and Maki disguises herself as a boy and takes a job caring for the expedition's horses so she can go along.  

Although Maki starts out focused on freeing her brother and possibly punishing some Invaders in the process, she gets to know some of the expedition's members and gradually makes friends with them.  By the time the story reaches its epic climax, Maki no longer views most of them as her enemies.

It took me over a week to read this book because... it was too tightly wound for my taste, to be honest.  Bad thing after bad thing happens, in quick succession, with too little respite for the characters or the readers.  

I think readers need the tension to ratchet up like a set of stairs, with a little breather here and there to give them a rest.  Those are often the scenes where I get more emotionally invested in the characters, because I don't need to spend all my emotional energy fearing for the characters' lives.  And this book just... had very, very little downtime.  Which made it hard for me to read.  In fact, I did something I have only done maybe twice before in the last twenty years:  I looked at the end.  I checked to see who was going to survive, because I was very, very close to not finishing the book, and I wanted to see if finishing it would be worth it or not.  There came a point where I set it aside a couple of days when I was about 75% done because I was not enjoying the book much.

Aside from that, this was a really well-written book in many other ways.  The characters were engaging and the world building was excellent.  I especially loved Maki's wolf-dog Iki -- he reminded me of my wolf/Malamute crossbreed Westley that we had when I was a teen.  He was my dog, the way Iki is Maki's, and yeah, I really liked their relationship.

I handed this off to my kids when I finished it, and my 12-year-old inhaled it in one day, so clearly, the pacing didn't bother her at all.  YMMV!

Particularly Good Bits:

"I like a good hero-story.  I daresay more men would be men if they took them to heart" (p. 77).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-10 for violence, some of which got a little bloody, and for all that tension and peril.

This has been the 33rd book I've read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.