Synopsis:
In 1995, a young Jewish woman was caught on a security camera shifting into a wolverine and attacking the man who’d been trying to rape her just moments before. The video got leaked online, where it quickly gained traction to become one of the first viral videos, and with it outed the greatest secret in the world: The supernatural is real, and it is all around us.
Soon, not only were Shifters - also known as Shifts - out, but Witches as well, men and women who could perform magic. More and more videos came out as Witches decided to share what they can do, and even some Shifters came out to explain who and what they were with the world. But then a few Witches got into a fight with normal humans, hurting them in the process, and things took a turn. Soon, people were scrambling to pass laws against Supers (or Supes); Christian Witches started spreading information about non-Christian Witches being more prone to "evil" magic; and many Witches wasted no time telling everyone how inhuman and animalistic Shifters were, how likely they were to attack unprovoked, forcing Shifters - not surprised by the slander and dehumanization - to go back into hiding as much as they were now able. Before even ten years had passed since that first video, yet another race war had begun, as deadly for the unprivileged as any other.
It’s about 20 years later, and people are still struggling to get used to the presence of Supers. 17-year-old Ala Jones has spent most of her life at California School for the Deaf, Riverside, a world forgotten by most, even Shifts and Witches. She watches the fight for equality with the vague interest of someone not directly involved in it, until the day her best friend is shot in front of her by a cop who claims he mistook their signing for magic - a ready made excuse for racist trigger happy tendencies - and her father decides to get the two of them out of LA, where tempers are heating up too quickly to be safe.
The two move to Coleville, CO, a small town an hour outside of Denver, where her dad goes to work helping an old friend’s gym stay afloat, and Ala tries to recover in the peace and quiet of the town. But there’s something off with her new friends and nearest neighbors, a large family living in an equally large house set far into the woods. More pressing, there’s something in those woods, something that’s been killing campers and seems impervious to bullets, and, if not dealt with soon, could start drawing the wrong kind of attention, the kind that could cause trouble for both Ala’s neighbors and herself. If she’s not careful, the shield of peace she’s built around herself in this small town could shatter as she’s pulled into a life or death fight that concerns her far more than she ever cared to realize.
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About the Author
Lindsay Mixer is an author of many interests, who believes in using those interests to fuel her writing. Already with a BA in English from Washington State University, she is now pursuing a Master’s in Sociology at Portland State University, where she plans on studying gender, sex, and race. After that, she’ll go on to get a PhD in Human Sexuality to become a sexologist with a focus in sex education. She is an intersectional feminist who thinks that the media is a powerful tool to teach people about the world, about right and wrong, and about acceptance, which is where this book comes in.
Will Anybody See the Dawn? came from a desire to write a fantasy novel about a Deaf girl. After studying ASL for many years, Mixer thought the lack of Deaf representation in the media a grave oversight, and wished to address this. The idea for this supernatural fantasy novel then spent several years stewing in the back of her mind, forming slowly but surely. Then, last year, Mike Brown was murdered on the street by a racist cop, and Mixer found herself following the media storm with fervor. As more and more black people were killed, she found herself wanting to do something to fight back, and so turned to her specialty: Writing. Thus, Dawn changed from a simple supernatural fantasy novel about a Deaf girl to a supernatural fantasy novel that was a statement on the race war going on in America today, about the privilege and oppression in the supernatural community and how it leaks into the mainstream and vice versa, and how it effects our youth - in this case, Ala Jones and her friends. The book discusses racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and how the intersection of all these things has profound effects on individuals.