Outlawed

Starred review from September 28, 2020
North’s knockout latest (after The Life and Death of Sophie Stark) chronicles the travails of a midwife’s daughter who joins a group of female and nonbinary outlaws near the end of the 19th century. Eighteen-year-old newlywed Ada, unable to conceive a child, fears she will be accused of witchcraft, a fate common to the women in her Dakota territory community. After Ada’s former friend has a miscarriage and accuses Ada of casting a spell on her, Ada’s mother helps her flee to a nunnery, where a Sister suggests she join a nearby gang known as Hole in the Wall. Ada becomes a “doctor” to the motley group led by the Kid (to whom no gender pronouns are attributed—“‘Not he, not she,’ Elzy said. ‘The Kid is just The Kid’”). The outlaws plan to create a town where nonconforming people can belong. The tense plot takes many turns through Ada’s increasingly violent adventures with the gang, beginning with a botched holdup of a wagon laden with gold. As the novel barrels toward a surprise ending, it’s further strengthened by Ada’s voice and reflections, which preserve a sense of immediacy: “distances that had once seemed vast were now so small that my enemies could cross them in an instant.” The characters’ struggles for gender nonconformity and LGBTQ rights are tenderly and beautifully conveyed. This feminist western parable is impossible to put down. Agent: Julie Barer, the Book Group.

October 15, 2020
A young woman in an alternate version of the 1890s American West joins a gang of outlaws. Ada is just a teenager living in the Independent Town of Fairchild when she's married off and expected to start a family with her new husband. The daughter of the town's midwife, Ada knows just about all there is to know about childbirth and childbearing--except the reasons behind the failure to conceive, the worst fate that can befall a woman in her society. (The standard punishment for a "barren" woman is to be hanged as a witch.) When she herself cannot get pregnant, Ada must leave her mother and young sisters behind, first fleeing to a convent. Then, when she becomes dissatisfied by the limitations to her learning that convent life dictates, she is directed by the Mother Superior to the Hole in the Wall Gang. Well known as robbers in "the territories," the gang is led by the mysterious Kid, a figure said to be as "tall as a pine tree and as strong as a grizzly bear." But when Ada is secreted to their hideout, she finds none of the outlaws, least of all the Kid, are what they seem. North has smashed two unlikely genres together here: the dystopian alternate history and the Western. Calling it The Handmaid's Tale crossed with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid goes some way to describe the novel's memorable world, but it is also wholly its own. It earns its place in the growing canon of fiction that subverts the Western genre by giving voice to the true complexity of gender and sexual expression, as well as race relations, that has previously been pushed to the margins of traditional cowboy or westward expansion tales. A genre- (and gender-) bending take on the classic Western.

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November 1, 2020
North's feminist Western novel features Ada, a young woman who has a good life going for her. She's the apprentice to her mother, a midwife, and married to a man she loves. But after a year of marriage, she still isn't pregnant, and Ada lives in a time and environment where barren women are fiercely distrusted. She ends up bringing her skills as a doctor to the Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outcast queer or barren women and gender-non-conforming folk. This is a lovely slow draw in the world of the Old West, a story about the people who don't belong, portraying a realistic, close-minded world that only accepts women willing to fit into a specific mold and that stigmatizes any woman who cannot give birth. It's exciting to read a Western tale that features such a range of women and queer characters, and Ada herself is a bold protagonist whose desire to learn more about the female reproductive system and how it actually functions runs fiercely in her veins. North's new book is perfect for fans of Sarah Gailey's Upright Women Wanted (2020).

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