Lone Women - Victor Lavalle

 

I find myself tiptoeing through my review of Victor Lavalle's Lone Women as I attempt to give a good feel for the book without spoiling it for potential readers. I have to start by stating that I knew next to nothing about the novel or its author before I brought it home with me from the library. That is how I began my reading despite having already read a brief review of the book in the October issue of Bookmarks magazine. Obviously, I must have been daydreaming while I read that review.

I mean, look at the cover. Doesn't that cover just scream historical fiction at the reader? I love historical fiction, and I've read a lot of it in recent months focusing on the period during which places like Montana, Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Dakotas were being settled by homesteaders brave enough to take on the elements found in those territories. Even after reading the brief disclosure inside the book jacket, I thought I knew exactly what I was getting from Lone Women. And I was wrong, very wrong.

Let's just say that I got my reading shock of the year when everything abruptly changed on page 81 of Lone Women and I realized that all bets were off. Ready or not, I was in for a memorable ride. I doubt that most readers are going to begin Lone Women as uniformed about the book or its author as I was, so I'm going to risk saying that the shock came from a sudden, dramatic genre-switch, a genre mash-up that works surprisingly well, as it turns out. So, on to the book now.

Adelaide Henry, a thirty-one-year-old black woman, is still single only because she's been largely confined to her family's California farm for her entire life. Her family has a secret it is so desperate to keep hidden from neighbors that the three of them only briefly ever see outsiders when they run in and out of church on Sunday mornings. But one morning in 1915, Adelaide has to go on the run after burning down the family farmhouse with her two dead parents inside. Carrying only a bag of six books and the heaviest steamer trunk imaginal with her, she flees to the isolation of a homestead in remote northern Montana, a state that does not distinguish by gender when granting government homestead to new settlers.

But as the book jacket hints, Adelaide is not really traveling alone. She carries a secret inside that heavy trunk, and she is prepared to guard that secret with her life. Unfortunately - or depending on whom you ask, perhaps very fortunately - for Adelaide, her new friends, and the townspeople of Big Sandy, the secret in the trunk is not going to consent to being kept under lock and key forever.

I can't tell you more than that despite not having any idea how this review will read to someone knowing little or nothing about Lone Women. I will add only that Victor Lavelle is a very good writer and stylist, that his "normalization" of the f-word in descriptive passages is both funny and effective, and that I now want to try something else of his. I will also say that Lavelle stretched my ability to suspend disbelief a tad over the line for a number of pages near the end of Lone Women. 

Most importantly, despite my rating of three stars for the novel, I will tell you that I'm happy that I read it because it was quite an experience.

Victor Lavelle jacket photo