Larry McMurtry meets Stephen King in Victor LaValle’s genre-bending Lone Women (One World 2023), and I couldn’t put it down.
The novel opens with 31-year-old Adelaide Henry fleeing her family’s farm and heading to Montana. She has a travel bag, a locked steamer trunk, and plans for a fresh start under the Homestead Act. She’ll settle the plot and earn ownership of her own land, her family’s farm in California a ghost of a memory. But as much as Adelaide wants to start fresh, the secrets in the steamer trunk bind her to the past and her family.
As a single Black female intent on settling in a harsh landscape with limited provisions, Adelaide quickly learns that she can’t isolate herself from those who’d seek to help. She makes friends with Grace and her son, Sam, and Grace’s generosity is quite literally a saving grace. There is one other Black person in the area, Bertie, and she feeds Adelaide’s soul. Adelaide, Grace, and Bertie are all “lone women,” single women taking advantage of the government’s offer of landownership for taming the land regardless of gender. But working together, the women are never truly alone; they will support each other by all means possible.
Not all the residents of the town are as welcoming to the single women, and they are subjected to theft, assault, and shunning. But that’s the cost of settling land, and they won’t give up. Adelaide won’t give up. Even when the secret locked in her trunk threatens to destroy her new life and rip apart the fragile bonds of the relationships she’s building.
Part western and part horror, the novel is firmly a novel of adventure and found family. I’m not going to tell you what’s in trunk; I’ll let LaValle do that. But I will say what’s locked up and why it’s locked up aren’t the only “horror” aspects of the novel.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 