"Outlawed" by Anna North
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Every summer, my husband’s extended family escape from the humid heat of Oklahoma and come north for a relaxing reunion on a wooded Wisconsin lake.
This year, when I drove up to join them, I noticed that the 20-something readers in the family – my nieces and nephews – were passing around a novel I had heard nothing about.
When the vacation was over and the 20-somethings were headed south again, the novel was left behind. I picked it up, noticing that the colorful portrait on the cover was a bit faded from the sun and the back cover was rippled, as if one of the readers had held it with hands wet from swimming.
I tucked the book into my weekend bag, transferred it to my bedside stack and promptly forgot about it – until now.
I don’t know what made me reach under seven other books and crack it open but this book had me from it’s remarkable first sentence: “In the year of our Lord, 1894, I became an outlaw,” and never let me go.
Anna North’s “Outlawed” is a thrilling, unpredictable feminist Western that unfolds in a kind of parallel history. It is the late 1890s and America is still reeling over the destruction that the Great Flu has wrought. Millions of Americans have died and in the struggling Western communities that have survived, the focus is on fertility and repopulation.
Which means that there is no place and no patience for women who cannot conceive. Ada is one such woman. The daughter of a midwife who has learned her mother’s trade, Ada has been married young. But when a year passes and she’s not yet pregnant, she faces the fate that other so-called “barren” women face – expulsion and hanging, named as witch.
Ada lights out for parts unknown and the novel swirls into an adventure that introduces her to a gang of outlaws determined to create a town for society’s marginalized and excluded.
Although I firmly believe the book is always better than the movie, I hope Hollywood has North’s number. This would make a great film!
— Kerri Miller | MPR News
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