My friend Victor LaValle (The Ballad of Black Tom) has a new novel out today.
In the opening pages of Lone Women, Adelaide Henry burns down her California home with the bodies of her parents inside it and sets out for Montana. But her plan to start a new life as a homesteader is hampered by the literal baggage she brings with her: a steamer trunk containing a monster that can never be abandoned or set free.
Although this is a horror novel whose supernatural elements are part of the fun, the best part of Lone Women, for me, is the portrait it paints of Adelaide and the community of other women she finds out on the plains. Definitely recommended.
(The New York Times, which calls the book “almost impossible to put down,” has its say here.)