As the first wave of pioneers travel westward to settle the American frontier, two women discover their inner strength when their lives are irrevocably changed by the hardship of the wild west in The Removes, a historical novel from New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Tatjana Soli.
[A] stunning new novel ... Soli’s novel is both gut-wrenchingly violent and heart-wrenching, but above all, it’s an unforgettable journey of loss and hope.
The Removes, a new novel by Tatjana Soli, promises so much ... The resulting novel is sadly stilted. Soli, who has written three novels, employs an awkward prose style in “The Removes,” a stark departure from the voices in her earlier work. Her sentences borrow constructions from the time period she’s writing about, but they work oddly, as though she’s trying on shoes that are a bit too small ... the novel doesn’t quite stand on its own ... It seems fair to ask: On the heels of centuries of overwrought racist captivity narratives, why center a large part of a novel on a white woman taken captive and raped repeatedly? ... in the end, it was the prose more than the politics that felt like a disappointment.
Soli’s fourth novel is an epic, enthralling look at the American West in the mid-1800s... With visceral, vibrant language, Soli paints a stark portrait of the violence, hardship, and struggles that characterized the American West.
