PositiveLiber Review\"... meticulously researched ... Scoundrel, a fascinating true story that likewise mixes crimes against women and midcentury literary grandiosity ... Weinman does not do as much to explore this issue as I would have liked—what does it mean that Buckley loved and was loved by a homicidal misogynist? Why did the pro-capital punishment Buckley see Smith as worthy of his advocacy? ... I longed for more women’s voices ... Weinman’s style owes much to the true-crime podcast
boom; it is painstaking about the evidence, investigations, legal appeals. She lets the facts and the players speak for themselves.\
Eleanor Henderson
RaveWomen\'s Review of BooksHenderson’s work is most definitely the story of a marriage, and in its searing specificity it may even get at larger truths about marriage as an experience and institution. But this is no typical case study. Her revelations upend the pretty pictures and easy confessions of Instagram, of popular song ... has the urgency of confession, and it is executed with elegant compression and sardonic wit. Henderson’s prose is full of those feminine throat-clearers and equivocations...But they are deployed, like the hundreds of exclamation points, with purpose and control; I had the sense that these were not tics, but necessary to capturing Eleanor’s inner sound ... Although the history of Aaron’s illness is painstakingly chronicled, the historian herself can seem strangely absent. Her physical reality, her frustrated ambition—they are there, but barely. When, nearly halfway through Everything I HaveIs Yours, Henderson describes working her tension out on a busted pair of Adirondack chairs, I found it hard to square the teller of this controlled tale with a woman capable of such physical aggression and release. True, she does mention rage-reading, rage-driving, the rage-washing of dishes throughout; but Henderson’s precise articulations are mostly in service of the depiction of Aaron’s illness. She must be angry, I thought as I read this litany of disappointments, stressors, misunder-standings, lies. But when this anger was directly referenced, I felt as if I had briefly found myself in some other story ... This is not really a complaint, and it’s certainly not a literary criticism. Henderson’s prose style and material are beautifully matched. That she disappears from the page, even while crafting all its sentences, is fundamental to the parasitic, or satellitic union of addict and codependent. And she shows us how both necessary and inadequate metaphor is in describing some of life’s more confounding experiences ... offers a great confidence.
Anna North
MixedThe Women\'s Review of Books... those first pages, hold much promise. The first-person narration has the understated swagger of a tall tale, and the straightforward prose has just enough old-timey flourishes to make the setting believable, never so much as to be distracting or hokey ... Such gender deconstructions are a nice match for a revisionist western and for our moment ... Neither motivation, I’m afraid, is very compellingly rendered on the page ... In our current publishing culture, we are eager to dismiss works with potentially offensive content as \'problematic.\' There is nothing problematic here, and that may be the trouble ... Ada’s progressive, intersectional consciousness is unimpeachable by contemporary standards, but is that analytically useful, or is it simply about signaling that Ada is on the right side of justice? By anachronistically applying our own HR rules on the past, even a speculative version of the past, the book fails to satisfyingly grapple with the real problems of the historical West, undercutting the grave evil done to marginalized people there ... at the level of narrative, however perfectly the themes of Outlawed speak to our zeitgeist, the story lacks the friction of real risk taking. As the novel wanders on, the problems come to seem like strawmen, the threats conjured merely as an excuse for a climactic set-piece shootout. The whole package has the whiff of an algorithm, as though Netflix slipped the author saleable buzzwords, and it veritably pitches itself to the movies ... does deliver in cinematic images...But lovely images can be static and do not a novel make. Nor do philosophical asides, although North has some sharp one-liners what straight-up genre promises, Outlawed fails to deliver. Thrillers, westerns, and adventure stories work by astonishment in scene-by-scene storytelling. By contrast, North’s scenes plod; they seem to have only one possible direction; they break strangely for backfill, as though the author is anxious to shore up her worldbuilding. She seems either snobbish or shy of action—she will set up an exciting event, only to cram its beats into a hurried paragraph, as though to avoid slumming for an effect as common as suspense. She routinely veers off into backstory at what should be the most exciting moments, or reminds us of the stakes of a situation after the fact. However vivid the descriptions and intelligent the ideas, the genrecrossing doesn’t work if those genre characteristics aren’t tended to—if the threat in a thriller isn’t believable, if the familiar tale doesn’t bring along its source material’s uncanny, primordial evil ... Books like Outlawed are indeed necessary, setting out as they do to take apart the old, harmful myths and offer something novel and visionary in their place.
