Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede

… I understand why people might think that excluding Native Americans contributes to the “white-washing” of American history, but I encourage readers to give Wrede the benefit of the doubt. In the Thirteenth Child, Wrede informs us that the First Peoples never crossed the Bering Land Bridge because they were too busy fighting dragons in Asia. She has thoughtfully considered the changes to European (and in this novel, African) colonization of the American continents that might have occurred if the Native Americans had not been here — and those changes make a very different American West than existed historically.  Read the rest.