Dread Nation

I've always found alternate histories to be interesting thought experiments. In this case, what if the North won the Civil War...because the dead rose on the battlefield at Gettysburg. In this world, slavery has been abolished, but Black people (along with Native Americans) are still treated as inferior to whites and young women, in particular, are placed in boarding schools to train them to protect white people from the very much still present threat of the dead. Jane and Katherine, two teenage Black girls, find themselves exiled from their exclusive combat school to the country's frontier, where they discover that there is much more to the state of things than they'd been lead to believe. The characters are compelling, and while the plot doesn't always entirely work, it definitely hooked me and I'm very interested in reading the sequel!