I tore through this book in a day. This was a dark atmospheric, mystery set on a reservation. Anna is struggling. She is being bullied at school. She works at the casino on the reservation and she feels like there is an ancient tribal myth that has come to life stalking her. Girls begin to go missing on the reservation, including her own sister. I don’t want to say too much to give away the mystery but I really enjoyed this one. This book has equal parts mystery as it does mythical horror. I would be all in on this as a tv series.
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Huge thank you to @berkleypub @prhaudio and @netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is not a new issue to me. I’m a volunteer at our regional theater and one of the theaters in the building has a lot of premiere plays. One of those plays not long before the pandemic brought recognition to the missing native american women. There was even an installation around the grounds of red dresses to draw even further attention.

So I jumped on the chance to read this. It took me many pages to connect with the story. I’m not really sure what the cause was, but I do wish it happened sooner. Had I not received an advanced copy for review, I might have set it aside. I’m glad I didn’t because it is a really good and powerful story. In addition to the young girls that go missing in this book, it also addresses how native americans address two spirited people. While not exactly the equivalent of transgender, the native americans’ two spirits are able to do both traditional male and female jobs of the tribe. And while they are admired for this, they are less accepted when it becomes about sexual preference instead of abilities. I always love to read through a character’s eyes that allows me to see another side of the world. Anna is both native american and two spirited. I was able to walk a little while in her shoes.

By the end of this one I was gripped by the story and even had a tear in my eye at the end of the author’s note. An observation that this one is listed as horror and while I do believe it shows the horrors of the world we live in, it is not what most would consider a horror story.

This is one of the more unique books I’ve read this year and definitely think it is worth the read if you are looking for something a little bit different.

In Sisters of the Lost Nation, Nick Medina has created a novel that is emotional and dramatic. The voice is authentic and real, presenting readers with a novel that presents the truth about the plight of Native women in a way that is beautiful, heartbreaking and yet hopeful. The character of Anna is incredibly engaging as she tries to discover what has happened about her sister and learns to accept herself. 

I love the focus on heritage, on both the past and how to move forward into the future without losing the stories and voices of the past. I love the respect for the elders in the culture and while the tribe in the story is not a real one, it incorporates all the truest elements from real tribes and remains authentic in its voice. I also found the search for the missing girls, the coldness of the white society, and the struggles of Native people incredibly real and compelling, revealing truths white people need to see. 

If you love drama and mystery, mythology and authenticity, I recommend reading this book. Nick Medina’s novel is timely, emotional and dramatic. The characters are engaging and compelling. The aspects of heritage and two spirits are well written and intriguing. The novel is moving and reveals truths that most readers should hear.

After the disappearance of her sister, Grace, Anna looks into the missing women of her reservation. This leads to some revelations regarding the modernization of her tribal community and the fight against drug use, abuse, and human trafficking. The story is gritty. I mean this in the most complimentary of ways. It's organic, hard and gets between your teeth. The book as a whole reads as a thriller. The author also notes that there are a lot of triggers in the story. If you are sensitive to drug use, death, abuse, racism, bullying, and more in stories, this might be one book to avoid.

Overall, I really liked the story. The characters are really well written as well. Anna grows through the progression of the book. The only issue that I struggled with was that the story jumps around in time. The chapters are labelled well to explain where in the time line the story takes place, but I felt the story would have actually benefited with being written chronologically. Other than that, I loved that Medina drew on the struggles of the indigenous people of today. The author's note at the end did a lot to explain the issues and more that are mirrored in the book. This might even be a re-read for me now that I have this information. I think I might even gain more from the story with this knowledge added to my perspective.

Anna Horn is a teenage member of the Takoka Tribe, who lives on the reservation in Louisiana with her family. The kids go off the reservation to school in the town, where she is bullied by kids of other races. Anna also works at the reservation casino as a maid after school to make money. A young Takoda man named Fox asks her to become part of his team at the hotel connected to the casino. They clean certain rooms, especially those on the eighth floor. Anna begins to see things happening on that floor, especially suite 808. Some young women brought there have vanished. She agrees to work there in hopes of finding out why, especially when her sister vanishes too.

Sisters of the Lost Nation kept me hooked. If you enjoy Native American stories and mysteries with a bit of possible supernatural, this will spin an interesting yarn about a different kind of YA heroine who may be what many tribes considered “two spirits.” It will take both spirits within Anna to solve the mystery and fight the danger.

It's important to know going into this book that it is neither a thriller nor a horror novel, although it sometimes has elements of those. It's more of a coming-of-age story for a girl mired in the trauma of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Meanwhile, this girl is also living in fear of a rolling disembodied head that's out there somewhere. It's a slow build, and I didn't love the timeline jumping, but it really nailed the ending. I loved thinking about the way stories change people, what the purpose of storytelling is, and what things can be true about monster stories even if you're not sure if the monster is real or not.

I want to preface this by saying I would still try future books by this writer. The writing itself was engaging, as was the story. For me personally, the chronological jumping around made it hard to follow, and I quickly lost interest in the story. I felt like there was a lot of redundancy within the storytelling. I was very interested in reading the plot and reading an Indigenous writer. It's clear Nick Medina is very talented. I felt the story dragged on, and it did not hold my attention.

I could NOT put this down. I had some trouble with the back and forth timeline to start, but this was ultimately a riveting look at how drugs, violence, and greed can affect tightly knit communities like the fictional Takoda Native American tribe in the novel. Sisters of the Lost Nation tells a heartwrenching story of family love, loss, and persevering and finding your identity in times of tragedy, and serves up a devastating look at the crisis striking Native American communities across the nation: missing girls and women who are overlooked by the justice system.

Sisters Of The Lost Nation by Nick Medina has the PERFECT cover. It straight up immediately caught my eye. Then the plot caught my attention. And well, seeing this on the audiobook app caught my ears. Medina's debut follows an Indigenous teenage girl named Anna Horn who is 17, working, and biding her time until she is old enough to get her per cap check. Anna lives with her parents and sister Grace on the Takoda reservation in Louisiana. Several Native girls go missing, but no one seems to be doing anything about it. On the one hand, Anna believes it could be due to this being from the stories she was told as a child by Ms Shelby who is also missing. On the other, well, it could be someone much more sinister. This all comes to a head when Anna's sister Grace goes missing.

Overall, I thought Sisters Of The Lost Nation was a captivating read. I found myself skipping a little ahead in the Netgalley eARC I had when I felt overly tense like I just had to know. Also, I loved Anna. She is tenacious and resilient. You see, she's bullied by the kids at school who call her King. No one does anything about it. But you know, she still works hard cleaning rooms at the casino and eventually trying to find out what happened to her sister and the missing women. As for the audiobook, it is narrated by Elva Guerra and is 9 hours and 34 minutes. The narration style wasn't for me. I prefer more... melodic narration to monotone. So, I think depending on your preference, mileage may vary. Also, I wanted to point out that I do not know if this book is OwnVoices and cannot speak to the representation. I'll try to link OwnVoices reviews as they come out.

Sisters of the Lost Nation is a fantastic debut woven around very real social issue of Native women and girls going missing. It’s a thriller and a mystery, with elements of horror and Native folklore. It’s also a story of sisterhood, family drama, inter generational trauma and cultural inheritance.

The story revolves around 2 sisters, Anna (the older one) and Grace; and it’s told in dual timelines, that really give us a full scope of what happened just prior to Grace’s disappearance and during the days and weeks that follow. I found the “before” to be tense and haunting, and the “after” to be harrowing and gut-wrenching.

When Anna was a young girl, her uncle told her an old Native tale about a monstrous creature. When Grace goes missing, Anna begins to wonder if the story could be real, and the monster could be responsible for her disappearance…

There is so much about this book that I absolutely loved. For one, the blending of the genres created such a unique final product, that refuses to be categorized as merely a thriller, or just a horror story. This book gave me some great thrills and scares, but also made me stop and consider social issues and injustices that aren’t talk about enough.

Anna is a great character. Her determination and relentlessness are awe-inspiring, but she is also full of certain kind of heaviness, sadness and pain. She made this story shine.

All in all, Sisters of the Lost Nation might be a fictional horror story, but the human horrors depicted within its pages reach beyond it. I seem to really connect with stories about generational trauma (like The Haunting of Alejandra), and this book was no different. The vague supernatural side plot added a delicious flavour to it, but its the human suffering that is truly at the heart of it. It’s the desperation and hopelessness that bleeds from within its pages. And it’s the realization that, for most families living on reservation, these events - the disappearances, abductions and murders of Indigenous women - are a tragic reality.

4 Stars!

Sisters of the Lost Nation did not look like a book I just wanted to read. It looked like a book I had to read. Even though I was not familiar with the author, the novel promised a story of real life horror with a social conscience and was something I just could not pass up. I jumped in looking for true horror and maybe some enlightenment along the way as well.



Anna Horn was an outsider. She was tormented by her classmates for not fitting the mold they wanted for her and bullied her relentlessly. Her teachers were no help. The guests at the casino hotel she worked at on the reservation all looked down on her since she was Native American. She even seems to be haunted by her own mind as a creature from stories of her tribe’s past hunts her dreams. It is this alienation that may have made her jump when Fox, one of the maintenance supervisors at the hotel and a relative of a tribal elder, offers her a special position. Someone was recognizing her work and her talent. It made her feel important. Unfortunately for her, it was going to help make her one of the most important people in the tribe, but not in a way anyone would ever wish for.



Girls had been going missing from the reservation for some time and Anna begins to suspect that the suites on the 8th floor of the hotel, and suite 808 in particular, has something to do with the disappearances. Fox has her cleaning the suite after it is used by a man for an hour or two. She begins to investigate to at least satisfy her own curiosity as to what was happening in the suite, but then things get kicked into high gear when her sister goes missing. Even worse, Anna finds the same lip balm her sister uses under the bed in suite 808. Anna knows there is something going on in the suite but struggles to get anyone to believe her. Even as Anna searches for the truth, she cannot truly grasp the evil that has taken root on the reservation and corrupted her people.



In Sisters of the Lost Nation, Medina shines a light on the epidemic of missing girls and women that plagues reservations across the nations. He crafts a tight story that is part real world horror and part mystery as Anna searches into the darkest corners of the reservation to find the truth. With the aid of reservation police who have little authority and limited jurisdiction and in opposition to a broader police force plagued by indifference, allies are hard to come by. Those who care can do little and those who can do more do not care. It is a desperate situation for her and the people of the reservation, but Anna cannot give up. While this is not a horror story, there is a lot of horror in the novel as well as some truly brutal events (although most of those are alluded to and kept toward the background). The story has an all-to-real feeling to it that is haunting.



Medina puts a lot into this novel and takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the horrors of the present as well as the dangers of forgetting the past. There is a very strong lesson to be learned in this novel beyond the real-world horror of the missing girls. There is a strength to be found from remembering the past, both the good and the bad parts of history, that allows Anna to find the truth in the face of those who turn a blind eye on reality by ignoring the darkness that lurks around each of us. Medina juxtaposes the past with the present through Anna, a girl who is haunted by the past but who just may have the power to be the new keeper of stories for her people, and is able to find balance between the dark and the light. In a world that tries to pick and choose the pieces of history we are allowed to remember, Anna finds the strength to carry on by facing it all and realizing that even the darkness of the past provides lessons that will allow her to change the future. This is a very powerful novel on a couple different levels and provides plenty of action and intrigue balances smoothly with a moral tale that can benefit every reader.



I would like to thank Berkley and NetGalley for this review copy. Sisters of the Lost Nation is available now.

This was phenomenal. Gave me goosebumps at the end. Particularly with the author's note which was a must read and very thought provoking.

I could not put this down. Thank you NetGalley and publisher for the opportunity to read this. This was poignant and loud. This did not hold back. This needs to be read. I was disgusted at the rate indigenous women disappear and so little return to their families. The way they are written off for one reason or another was so sad. It takes a lot of courage and determination to pursue what is right and look for answers. To search for your loved one as long as it takes and hope someone will pick up where you left off if you are no longer able to search.

Sisters of a lost nation, we see you, we hear you, we will find you,

Part thriller/suspense and part horror with some Native lore thrown in, Sisters of the Lost Nation by Nick Medina sucked me in from the beginning!

Right away, I was invested in Anna's story. I had so many questions from the first few pages, compelling me to keep reading. What was going on in Suite 808? Where are the missing girls? What is following Anna???

Not only is the reader intrigued by Medina's tale, but we're drawn into the life of people on the reservation. We observe the sacredness of their stories. We feel the frustration at the limitations of tribal law enforcement. We grieve with the families of the missing girls.

Poignant storytelling combined with portrayal of reservation life and the plight of Native women...Sisters of the Lost Nation is a must read!

Read this, if you like:
• Diversity in books
• Gothic Horror
• Thrillers
• Perfect book club read 

Also reviewed on Amazon and Goodreads

A mixed genre tale of one young woman, Anna, of tribal descent who will center this story as it moves between the all too real disappearance of native girls and women: and the ancient tales told and retold to their youth to scare them into keeping safe.

Nick Medina tells Anna's story, beginning with a snapshot in time as her uncle repeats an often told story of a demon who steals those persons who ignore the warnings and venture out alone. This snapshot will become all too real when Anna's sister goes missing. As Medina ties the past to the present, his development of Anna and her world gives us a vivid look into a world where sometimes the demons are just men full of evil intent. The story contains many instances of abuse and violence, it is not for the faint of heart. For those that brave Anna's mysteries, you'll find one heck of a story.

Pub date: 4/18/23
Genre: thriller/mystery
Quick summary: Anna's reservation home hides some dark secrets, and when her little sister becomes the latest girl to disappear, she'll have to investigate.

This book reminded me a lot of FIREKEEPER'S DAUGHTER; as in that book, protagonist Anna is an outcast motivated to uncover crimes that others seem eager to ignore. It's a bit of a puzzle at the beginning, as the time keeps shifting from past to present. But don't get discouraged - once you get into it, the narrative moves forward with good tension. I started the book on audio but switched to text because it was easier for me to keep track of time shifts - and I really wanted to know what would happen! Medina's writing brought a great sense of place to the narrative, and I felt like I was right there with Anna' and the missing girls. I was glad to see her fight to speak truth to power. 3.5 stars rounded to 4.

Thank you to Berkley and @letstalkbookspromo for my e-ARC, and @PRHAudio for the complimentary audiobook.

Thank you to the author for writing this incredibly important story and the publisher and NetGalley for giving me the honored privilege to read and review this book!

This five-star debut novel is a mystery with horror elements on the surface, but it is SO MUCH more. It deals with the 𝒆𝒑𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒎𝒊𝒄 - in the words of the Chicago Tribune that the author discusses- of Native women disappearing, murdered or abused, and never being found because law enforcement does not care nor provide the resources to tribal police officers to effectively do their jobs. I wish such a topic was just fiction but it is a real problem faced by Native communities, that our nation’s government largely ignores, even though there is a National Day for Missing and Murdered Native Women (May 5). This was a topic that I knew almost nothing of, until I read this book and chatted with a friend, and for this reason alone, I would implore anyone reading my review, to read this book to get educated on this unresolved injustice.

Aside from the portrayal of the crisis, it is also an extremely well-written and well-thought novel. I had such a hard time believing it is a debut. I would like readers to go in as blind as possible but just know it’s the story of a Native community whose several women go missing. Anna, whose sister Grace has vanished, persistently tries to find her whereabouts. In the process, Anna is often humiliated by her non-Native peers and shunned by law enforcement who should be proactive.

Please do not miss reading the book’s epilogue to get the entire story, or the valuable Author’s Note. Of note, I really enjoyed reading about Two Spirits individuals! This book is certainly making its way to among my top 10 books I would have read in 2023.

This book is a really good blend of supernatural Indigenous lore horror, and also the very real horrors of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women epidemic that is plaguing Indigenous communities in North America. While I really enjoyed the horror moments, the thriller bits of Anna, a young adult Indigenous woman living on a reservation, slowly peeling back the dark layers of the tribal casino she works at, were so, so good and so, so upsetting. The stakes were high enough when Anna was dealing with aggression and bullying from her peers, and when she was seeing strange things at the casino involving a mysterious suite, but once her younger sister Grace disappears the emotional stakes get that much higher. This book knows how to make an impact on the reader and how to put a spotlight on a very real problem of violence and injustice that targets Indigenous women, and it really struck a nerve with me.

Horror and thriller fans alike need to check out SISTERS OF THE LOST NATION. It's visceral and devastating, and I am very excited to see what Nick Medina does next.

This book really grew on me. The tribe mythology threw me off a bit when it seemed like it was causing the story to take a supernatural turn. A. Mysterious room in a hotel attached to a casino and missing women from the reservation make for a steady pace. Anna is in high school, a misfit, and she drives the story and the characters. A good folk lore filled mystery.

Copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley

I’ve heard a lot about the high numbers of Native women that go missing each year, so it was interesting and timely to read a book about that subject.

Anna is the eldest of 3 living on the rez in Louisiana. A few years ago, a casino was built on the rez and Anna and her younger sister Grace both work there. They also both go to high school in town. When Grace doesn’t come home, Anna is immediately worried. A few other young women have recently gone missing and Anna knows that there is something shady happening on the eighth floor of the casino hotel.

While I did overall enjoy this book, I do think it could’ve been a little shorter. In the middle it started to feel a little drawn out and I got anxious waiting for the resolution. Because of that, I started to skim more in the final 25% of the book. To me, that shows that there was a lot of unnecessary plot just to drag the mystery out a little further. I also felt like there were story points that were purposely left vague that would’ve benefited from being more specific. For example, Anna is being bullied at school. At the very beginning of the story, you find out that her graduating class nominated her as Homecoming King. But the exact reason she’s being bullied, which is a part of who she is as a person, are just left up to the reader to interpret.

Another part that bugged me was not knowing when exactly this story took place. I think it took place in the late 90s/early 00s? It’s not something key to the story, but just felt weird that it was never specified.

The unfortunate fact about this story is that it is so closely related to the truth. There is a disproportionate number of young Native women who go missing each year and no attention is brought to it. I appreciate what this book has done in bringing this story into the forefront. This book is full of bad men and strong women and I very much appreciated that.

As far as the mystery element, I don’t think it’s one in which you aren’t supposed to know who did it but more so how and whether or not her sister will be found. I won’t ding this story just because I knew what had happened. It kept me intrigued and invested the entire time, even with its weak points.

If you’re looking for a unique mystery, I recommend checking this one out. I haven’t read a story like it, and I think the perspective it brings is much needed. I enjoyed all of the characters, but do think they could’ve been more fleshed out. There are some plot points that felt unnecessary or maybe they felt unnecessary because they weren’t followed through. I think this book could be good for book clubs that enjoy mysteries and I’m curious to see what Medina writes in the future and whether or not his writing matures.

Sisters of the Lost Nation by Nick Medina was incorrectly classified as horror and it’s much more a Native American thriller. Please don’t advertise this as horror. Unfortunately I was unable to finish this book before the publication date. It is a well written and much needed novel but it’s just not suited for my taste. It’s not you, it’s me. Thanks to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing Group for the ARC.