"Outlawed" by Anna North - Review

I grew up in the deserts of Arizona, dreaming every night of running wild on horseback with a gang of my dustiest, rowdiest friends. As a young girl, I actually enjoyed watching old western movies. My grandfather even supplied many of the horses and wagons used in the 1985 film, "Lonesome Dove". Professional cowgirls and cowboys were my heroes, horses were my best friends, and the "western lifestyle" of campfires and coyotes howling under a star-lit sky at night was my lifestyle.

So you can imagine, as a now twenty-five-year-old woman who has recently come out as gay, my excitement at discovering a modern-day queer western novel! This was perhaps the most incredible, dream come true sort of representation that I never thought I would find when I was a child or young adult.

For the simple fact that this novel exists, I am grateful.

"Outlawed" is the story of women escaping unfair prosecution for being barren; they are deemed to be witches and are hanged after failing to produce children.

Ada, the protagonist, is a lovable character. She is an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife, and a caring older sister; even raising her baby sister for a year as her mother suffered from what is not named, but made to seem like postpartum depression. Through a series of events, Ada finds herself being run out of her town after being unable to conceive a child, some people close to her betraying her and even accusing her of witchcraft. She first finds refuge in a convent but shortly leaves to join the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a group of women just like her who have become thieving, murdering outlaws.

To give you an example of how quickly to story progresses- Ada finds the gang on page forty-nine and is accepted as a member on page fifty-seven. At first, I enjoyed the pace, being excited to get to the shoot-outs at fifty paces and such. But it quickly became clear that this was not brevity, but shallow writing.

The leader of the Hole in the Wall Gang, The Kid, is described as grandiose and charismatic. I found neither to be true. Other than the description of clothing that only slightly stands out from the surrounding characters, I found very little care put into making us believe The Kid was "special". If the description later in the novel of what seems to be symptoms of Bipolar Disorder is supposed to be synonymous with "grandiose", I'll pass. At best I would say The Kid is enigmatic.

The character development is critically low across the cast. Ada is the only member that I felt was fully developed and I believe that is only the case because the entire story is told from her point of view. The other members of the gang all blurred together in my mind, causing me to look back from time to time while trying to remind myself of their characteristics or importance.

Perhaps the most infuriating aspect of this story is a sentence that occurs no less than three times, each in a slightly different wording but amounting to this:

"Here are all the things that happened after (insert action point)."

What follows each time is a painfully dull point-by-point explanation of action, rather than the riveting, exhilarating experience of the action itself. Each time I read this sentence, it felt like someone pressed pause, held my hand, and slowly walked me through a park rather than let me run through the desert in a hail of bullets.

This sentence is like bad sex. Any anticipation, adrenaline, anxiety, wonder, or thrill that was crafted before all but literally goes up in flames because this sentence stops everything just short of the point of satisfaction. No payoff. No literary orgasm.

Why an author would work so hard to make readers feel something or let them become invested in a situation, to then pour cold water on it, I do not understand. I do not think this was intentional; I think this was a sign that Anna North didn't quite know how to craft the action scenes this novel had the potential to carry out and probably gave us her best alternative.

The ending wraps in such an anti-climatic way that I was left wondering why Ada ever needed to become a part of the Hole in the Wall Gang, and subsequently, why I needed to read this book at all. This novel could have been exciting but I felt that it lacked gravity at every turn. This novel could have been a bright feminist torch, leading us into a thrilling new space in fiction; instead, I find myself hoping someone will write a better version.

My rating: 2.0 out of 5.0.