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Outlawed by Anna North

Historical fiction

Outlawed

by Anna North

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Quick take

Giddy-up! This feminist spin on a Western stars a gang of lovable outcasts who rob and plot in search of a better life.

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    Quest

Synopsis

The day of her wedding, 17-year-old Ada's life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows.

She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose, and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must decide whether she's willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.

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Get an early look from the first pages of Outlawed.

Outlawed

Chapter I

In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw. Like a lot of things, it didn’t happen all at once.

First I had to get married. I felt lucky on the day of my wedding dance. At seventeen I wasn’t the first girl in my class to marry, but I was one of them, and my husband was a handsome boy from a good family—he had three siblings, like me, and his mama was one of seven. Did I love him? We used to say we loved our beaus, my girlfriends and I—I remember spending hours talking about his broad shoulders, his awkward but charming dancing, the bashful way he always said my name.

The first few months of my marriage were sweet ones. My husband and I were hungry for each other all the time. In ninth form, when the girls and boys were separated to prepare us for married life, Mrs. Spencer had explained to us that it would be our duty to lie with our husbands regularly so that we could have children for baby Jesus. We already knew about the children part. We had read Burton’s Lessons of the Infant Jesus Christ every year since third form, so we had heard about how God sent the Great Flu to cleanse the world of evil, just like he’d sent the flood so many centuries before. We knew that baby Jesus had appeared to Mary of Texarkana after the sickness had killed nine of every ten men, women, and children from Boston to California, and struck a covenant with her: If those who remained were fruitful and peopled the world in His image, He would spare them further sickness, and they and their descendants forever after would be precious to Him.

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Why I love it

Anna North’s latest book is cottagecore in novel form. Think prairie dresses, herbal remedies, and women homesteading on the American frontier. If dressing like it’s 1894 doesn’t feel like your thing, I would note that, having finished this book in two sittings, I feel confident calling it a Western for people who don’t usually read Westerns.

Accused of witchcraft when she can’t conceive a child, Ada must choose: face a witch trial and risk being hanged, or join the Hole in the Wall Gang and become an outlaw. Turns out, the most fearsome outlaws this side of the Mississippi are just like her—women and nonbinary people ostracized for being “barren,” gender-nonconforming, or witches. Having learned holistic medicine from her mother, Ada becomes the Gang’s de facto doctor and assists with small robberies and wagon heists as she proves herself.

But petty theft is just the beginning of the Gang’s far-reaching, not to mention dangerous, plans. A rollicking adventure, a surprising love story, and a social commentary in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale, this novel is full of both nuance and extraordinary compassion.

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View all
Dirty Diana
The Stone Witch of Florence
The Seventh Veil of Salome
Hera
The Lion Women of Tehran
The Return of Ellie Black
Annie Bot
More
Bright Young Women
The First Ladies
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
Weyward
Queen of Thieves
Hester
Love on the Brain
Bronze Drum
The Bodyguard
The Change
Lessons in Chemistry
Kaikeyi
My Body
Half Sick of Shadows
The Girl with Stars in Her Eyes
Outlawed
More Myself
Practical Magic
A Rogue of One's Own
True Story
Fleishman Is in Trouble
The Book of Longings
Untamed
The Kingdom of Back
The Girl with the Louding Voice
Throw Like a Girl
Trick Mirror
Bringing Down the Duke
Shout
Thick
Still Lives
The Nightingale