NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Blue skies, empty land—and enough wide-open space to hide a horrifying secret. A woman with a past, a mysterious trunk, a town on the edge of nowhere, and an “absorbing, powerful” (BuzzFeed) new vision of the American West, from the award-winning author of The Changeling. “Propulsive . . . LaValle combines chills with deep insights into our country’s divides.”—Los Angeles Times ONE OF BOOKPAGE'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE AND LOCUS AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, Vulture, Paste, Tordotcom, Book Riot, Polygon, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear. The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will become one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can tame it—except that Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory. Crafted by a modern master of magical suspense, Lone Women blends shimmering prose, an unforgettable cast of adventurers who find horror and sisterhood in a brutal landscape, and a portrait of early-twentieth-century America like you’ve never seen. And at its heart is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past—or redeem it.

Lone Women got a lot of just above and just below average reviews. Where the book shines is in the way the characters work. Adelaide is a complex and interested protagonist and the characters surrounding here -- fellow homesteaders Grace and Sam, townsfolk Bernie and Fiona, the criminal family of the Mudges -- are all sketched well. The book shines the best in the small moments LaValle spends exploring these characters. We loved hearing about Fiona's story of anti-Chinese bigotry and search for her lost family and the details of the Mudge family crimes are dark and compelling. The second strength is the setting -- homestead Montana is just a very rich environment that offers a great context for Adelaide's search for a home and struggle to survive. LaValle uses this setting to great effect in a few moments, including a haunting horror chapter in an abandoned town. But the problem is that the central plot of the book does not add up. At the core of the story is that fact that Adelaide is traveling to Montana with a monster locked in a trunk, a flying demon that happens to be her sister. Half of the book is this secret being revealed and the other half is dealing with what happens when Elizabeth (the monster sister) gets loose and has to be redeemed. The plot starts ok with a strong opening scene of Adelaide burning down her family home with her dead parents inside and then builds with a good mystery of what's in the trunk she's carrying, but every revelation and plot step once Elizabeth is revealed drags the novel down. So much of the finale just isn't earned -- LaValle just starts introducing things to move the plot he hasn't established. Wait, another family in this random town had a monster child they killed at birth? I'm sorry -- there are believers in old Aztec myths in Montana that recognize Elizabeth as one of their gods and can give Adelaide a potion to help her find her sister? Even the great ghost story above doesn't make sense; why are there ghosts in the story at all, given that they just appear in one chapter and then go away? LaValle ends up stuck in a bad place between two better alternatives. He neither sets up a consistent storyworld nor does he lean into horror where he wouldn't need anything more than symbolic logic. Instead, the novel half-explains things and then makes convenient plot choices to get us to its happy ending, one in which Elizabeth's routine murder of innocent people can be overlooked when she's accepted as family, and then a town can be established in the Montana wilderness that magically attracts lone women to it. It's just insulting that we're supposed to accept all of this, either as a consistent plot or frankly as a moral happy ending, as several of the characters who are redeemed (Elizabeth, the youngest Mudge) have done truly horrible things that are just forgotten about in the conclusion. All of us wished the book could have just cut all the magical elements and just focused on the more compelling story of Adelaide trying to survive as a lone Black women in Montana. LaValle is not a bad writer at all, but he needs to focus on his strengths. A book that was smaller, more realistic, and more focused on the character work he does so well would be something we could actually recommend.