Outlawed

The opening line, "In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw," sets the tone for this unique and adventurous western novel. At 17, Ada marries her sweetheart and all is well in the world until she fails to conceive a child within a year. Forced to flee her village due to rumors and accusations of witchcraft; she hides in a convent passing the time transcribing medical books. Unable to keep still, she runs away to find the Hole in the Wall Gang where she joins The Kid and her merry band of troublemakers. Their thieving, cowboy ways help fund a life of safety for female outcasts, many who were also barren like Ada. Together they decide to make their own future free from men and their simple minded ideas about femininity and show more motherhood. Bank robbing, cattle hustling, and deception are just some of their many ploys. Action packed and full of adventure this unique western with unforgettable characters will appeal to fans of True Grit and feminist and LGBTQ literature. A must read. show less

The Publisher Says: In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw.

The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada's life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows.

She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose, and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must show more decide whether she's willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.

Featuring an irresistibly no-nonsense, courageous, and determined heroine, Outlawed dusts off the myth of the old West and reignites the glimmering promise of the frontier with an entirely new set of feminist stakes. Anna North has crafted a pulse-racing, page-turning saga about the search for hope in the wake of death, and for truth in a climate of small-mindedness and fear.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Imaginative, inventive, and insolent prose telling the oft-told tale of good soul gone bad. It's not a new trope or even take...woman blamed for problems she can't control, runs away, lives her best life among other like-minded women...but it's very well crafted and quite fun to read.

“The point is, you live like I did, you start being able to spot what makes some people sink and other people swim. There’s a quality, I don’t even know how to describe it—sometimes it looks like luck and sometimes it looks like skill and sometimes it doesn’t look like either one. But you have it, I saw it when I met you. You’ve made a lot of mistakes, but you’re a good bet. You’ll swim.”
–and–
“If they take you, keep your head up. Don't beg for your life. Don't confess to any sin. If you die without shame, the shame is all theirs.”

These women, cast out for failing to give birth, find their world is much bigger and much sweeter when they embrace freedom from expectations. Deeply, deeply relatable to this old queer gent. show less

i enjoyed this alternative history of the 1890s, with overt feminist, antiracist, and queer/trans overtones running throughout. the writing is very good (i'd read her again) and the way women take control of their lives when it is taken from them by society is inspiring. this is about women accused of witchcraft (usually because of being barren or other babies in their towns being miscarried or born with genetic defects) leaving their homes and finding home with each other. if they didn't flee, they'd be killed, so they escape and find other women like themselves, and create a community of outlaws who, yes, thieve and harm, but who are just trying to survive themselves. and they have a dream of creating a town that is a safe haven for show more these women, where people can come and be safe and can contribute their worth to the group.

the gang and many of the people in it are based on real people in history (at least their names are) but i don't know how much of this is historical. it's just a good, thoughtful read with incidental queerness and transness as a way of life. i do wish that ada's first family had been revisited somehow, but i understand why, realistically, they couldn't be. i really like how anna north is giving us hope at the end, and that she's giving us options in the way to make change. that she's saying we can do it from the inside, or that we can do it from the outside if we make community. to be there for each other and to welcome others in. it's a slow kind of change and progress, but it is still a hopeful one. i also like the discussion she starts around blame and scapegoating. she uses the sheriff, who knows and understands that these women aren't witches and aren't responsible for miscarriages in town, as her example. because even though he knows this, he also believes that the townspeople need someone to blame, and he is willing to sacrifice these women, who he knows to be innocent, to "keep the peace" and to allow this evil to continue, because it's an outlet and it's easier. it raises an interesting question of in what other ways we do this, and why. show less

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through Netgalley. Trigger warning for mental illness, homophobia, misogyny, and rape. Caution: there are vague spoilers ahead!)

In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw. Like a lot of things, it didn’t happen all at once. First I had to get married.

“When someone believes in something,” Mama said, “you can’t just take it away. You have to give them something to replace it."

“We may be barren in body, dear Doctor, but we shall be fathers of many nations, fathers and mothers both. You see, when we found this land, I knew it was promised not just for us, but for the descendants of our minds and hearts, all those cast out of their homes and banished by their families, show more all those slandered and maligned, imprisoned and abused, for no crime but that God saw fit not to plant children in their wombs. I knew that we would build a nation of the dispossessed, where we would be not barren women, but kings.”

The eldest of a midwife's four daughters, and her mother's apprentice at that, seventeen-year-old Ada Magnusson is more scientifically-minded than most in the small town of Fairchild. Yet she's still subject to their superstitions, which are turned on Ada in full force when she fails to become pregnant after a year of marriage. Things go from bad to worse when an outbreak of the German measles results in three miscarriages. The people of Fairchild need someone to blame - and Ada has become their newest witch.

Ada's mom sends her off to a convent, the Sisters of the Holy Child, which is mostly populated by barren women like herself. It is here that Ada begins her life of crime, copying illicit books in the storeroom under the library in exchange for coins to spend on yet more books. Ada is determined to unlock the secrets of her "treacherous" body - to find out why some women are incapable of bearing children - so that she may save other unlucky women from ostracism, jail, or the gallows.

It's here that she learns of Mrs. Alice Schaeffer, a doctor studying infertility, and her call for research subjects in the west. But in place of Pagosa Springs, the Mother Superior gives Ada a choice: the habit or the Hole in the Wall. Ada chooses the latter, a notorious gang of outlaws led by the Kid, " a man tall as a pine tree and as strong as a grizzly bear, who once shot a deputy’s hat off his head while riding backward on his horse."

The Hole in the Wall Gang is not what Ada expected: a seven-member found family of "deviant" women (some of them queer, and arguably nonbinary), all cast off from society like Ada. Here Ada - christened "the Doctor" - finds a tenuous sort of kinship, even as she longs for Mrs. Schaeffer's promise of knowledge. But the Gang is always a few botched jobs away from starvation, even as the Kid's grand dreams threaten to steer them towards implosion.

The world created by Anna North in OUTLAWED is fascinating, at once both wholly familiar and eerily strange - almost like an Uncanny Valley of space and place. The book feels like historical fiction but is really alternative history: in this version of the American West, a Great Flu ravaged the country in the 1830s, killing 9 out of 10 men, women, and children.

The new Christianity that rose out of the wreckage celebrates fertility: women are encouraged to have as many children as possible, and doing so grants them "special" rights. For example, a woman may divorce her husband after having three children, and a woman with four children is practically unimpeachable. Premarital sex isn't necessarily a bad thing - but if you run around with a guy for long enough without becoming pregnant, your barrenness (not your promiscuity) will become the grist of rumor mills.

This obsession with BABIES! and women's bodies is all downsides, of course: being childfree is not a valid lifestyle choice, and women who don't have kids are branded as witches. And of course, abortion is illegal - even in cases of rape and incest.

OUTLAWED feels a bit like a Western spin on THE HANDMAID'S TALE, save for these little details; it's rather disconcerting, like everything is off by four or five degrees, and the ground is all wibbly wobbling under you. And I kind of love it. The setting is its own character.

I also adore the Hole in the Wall Gang - no surprise there! - the dynamics of which are messy and complex and wonderful. The Kid, Cassie, Elzy, Texas, Lo, News, Agnes Rose - if I was going to take on the white supremacist patriarchy, I'd want them by my side.

The big score - aka the Kid's plan to rob the Fiddleback bank and then use the proceeds to buy the whole gorram town - is as daring as it is full of holes, but damned if I wasn't rooting for it. And while it doesn't go down quite like in the Kid's imagination, the ending is so much more grounded and inspiring than I might have hoped for. (I started 2021 with a new RGB calendar, and January's quote seems apropos: "Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.")

OUTLAWED is an odd, unexpected, thoughtful, heartfelt feminist tale about trying to make the world a better place - even as tries its damnedest to grind you down. So, like, the kind of story we need now more than ever. show less

Very creative story covering reality of myth surrounding women unable to get pregnant in the days before science understood why and has generally dispensed with the myth. Combines Old West mythology of Outlaws with the reality of Women treated as second rate humans. The writing was excellent and kept me wanting to keep reading to see what was around the next corner. Characters were well developed and realistic. Maybe a better story than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and would make a great movie.

Fast paced and fabulous! I enjoyed the alternate history worldbuilding and the ways misogyny is founded on the same principles, but to fit the need (in this case, underpopulation) the details come out different.

I don't think I agree that this book is uninterested in gender except where it concerns cis women and their reproductive abilities. It just doesn't spoon-feed the reader characters who always have super-enlightened thoughts about their own positionality. Yeah, Ada is straight, weird kink but I guess that's allowed. The gang member who suggests sleeping with gay men I read as transmasculine for multiple reasons. The crossdressing festival definitely gets at something about how misogynist and transphobic societies have ways of show more letting off gendered steam while reinforcing the hierarchy (see also, British panto), but no, it's not an essay deconstructing the practice. show less

The new novel by Anna North, called Outlawed, is worth a read. It stirs up the western with a provocative blend of alt-history and feminist consciousness. The result is a thrilling tale that is once familiar yet fresh.

Ada is a midwife’s daughter learning to be a midwife herself. However, after a year of marriage at the age of 17, she is still not pregnant so her mother-in-law sends her home. Then measles sweeps through the village, causing women to miscarry. People look for someone to blame so the sheriff comes knocking, accusing Ada of witchcraft. She flees for her life, first to a convent then to join a gang of outlaws who resemble legendary male outlaws except they’re not necessarily men. Ada struggles to find her place in this show more group of outlaws until she realizes that her midwifery can be useful to the team. And while Ada and her group of outlaws set out to conquer a town and turn it into a refuge for the barren and the lost, the sheriff is hot on their tail. In the end, Ada must not only confront the sheriff in a classic Western standoff but must learn to not only channel her feelings of inadequacy and shame but her scientific knowledge (which sadly is frowned upon) into a force that can be used for good.

Since we live in a time when a huge percentage of the population seeks to control women's bodies and tons of folks deny medical science, this book is eerily relevant. “Barren” women are, of course, the equivalent of lepers in this alternate history where the Flu killed 9 out of 10 people. The focus on repopulation is immediate rather than religious but religion weighs in with accusations, murdering women, etc. The majority of these folks in the story are MAGA-types who embrace lunatic fringe preachers and their teachings. While this is alternative fiction, it is not escapist. Far from it. This book deals with some heavy subject matter.

I will say that I enjoyed this book and I thought the ending to be satisfying but I was confused about the LGBTQIA representation in this book. It seemed to me to be fully fleshed out and then kind of reductive in the end. Nevertheless, this is a very unique western!

Trigger warnings: depression & barrenness. show less