#5 – Lone Women by Victor Lavalle – Best Reads of 2023

I came for Montana and stayed for the craziness. Victor Lavalle’s Lone Women takes a real historical trend—single African-American women taking advantage of the Homestead Act to set up shop in the Big Sky country of the 1910s—and turns it into a compelling story of frontier relationships, corruption, and…well, yes, horror.

In fact, the book starts at a crime scene where 31-year-old Adelaide Henry is dousing her family’s house with gasoline and setting off alone from their farm with a mysterious locked steamer trunk. Of course the trunk will come to play a big role in this story, which takes a number of violent turns before its spectacular and surprising ending.

The writing is propulsive and Lavalle manages the suspense well. But along the way he gives you a feel for a particular place and time and with a larger demographic palette than we are used to seeing in frontier stories. The landscape is vast and deadly but there is a new power emerging in the likes of Adelaide and her resourceful companions.

This is not a book for the faint of heart but as a genre-busting thriller, Lone Women delivers.

Previous entries in the Best Reads of 2023:

#6 – I, Julian by Claire Gilbert

#7 – Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard

#8 – The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

#9 – Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles

#10 – 24 Hours in Charlottesville by Nora Neus