Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It's locked at all times. Because when the trunk is opened, people around her start to disappear... The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, and forced her to flee her hometown of Redondo, California, in a hellfire rush, ready to make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will be one of the "lone women" taking advantage of the government's offer of free land for those who can cultivate it-except that Adelaide isn't alone. And the secret she's tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing keeping her alive.
Enthralling ... Nothing in this genre-melding book is as it seems ... The combination of LaValle’s agile prose, the velocity of the narrative and the pleasure of upended expectations makes this book almost impossible to put down ... LaValle’s Lone Women deftly weaves history, horror, suspense and the perspectives of those rarely recorded in the West.
Infused with creeping dread and chilling horror. But there's more to this book than just that — it's an excellent novel that blurs genres and looks at early-20th-century America from a perspective that's been ignored for far too long ... LaValle is a master at building suspense and creating a tense atmosphere that makes it difficult to stop reading. This novel ends with a welcome left turn, one that's unpredictable, but fully earned, a fitting conclusion to a book that's filled with twists ... As much as Lone Women is a horror novel, it's also a western, and LaValle's take on the genre is refreshing. He centers the book around women and people of color — it's a welcome antidote to the westerns of the past, where the heroes were always white men, and anyone who wasn't one was either a villain or a supporting character ... A wonderful novel.
He adroitly intertwines the eerie fairy tale with early 20th-century historical realism ... LaValle subtly links Lone Women to an African American literary storyline envisioning a woman who unshackles herself from a societal yoke long weighed upon her. By replanting this narrative with small-town Southern roots into a Western self-reliance tale, while mixing in the deranged, the author has fashioned an eccentrically satisfying literary mash-up.
