enne📚 reviewed Lone Women
Lone Women
4 stars
Lone Women is a novel set around 1915 about Adelaide Henry, a lone black woman who travels alone to Montana lugging a mysterious locked steamer trunk and her family's secrets.
I enjoyed all the spooky elements of this story, and how the steamer trunk secret is a slow burn horror reveal, starting from Adelaide's fear when anybody looks too closely at it, and continuing with disappearing folks and other horror when it opens. However, about three quarters through there's a full reveal that feels disingenuous to the reader with details that Adelaide has elided the whole time. This moment just felt a little contrived to me, and as a reader I didn't believe that she had a reason not to mention it until then. I wrote some more spoiler-filled thoughts in this comment.
Overall, I dug the frontier vibes, folks learning to trust and care for strangers …
Lone Women is a novel set around 1915 about Adelaide Henry, a lone black woman who travels alone to Montana lugging a mysterious locked steamer trunk and her family's secrets.
I enjoyed all the spooky elements of this story, and how the steamer trunk secret is a slow burn horror reveal, starting from Adelaide's fear when anybody looks too closely at it, and continuing with disappearing folks and other horror when it opens. However, about three quarters through there's a full reveal that feels disingenuous to the reader with details that Adelaide has elided the whole time. This moment just felt a little contrived to me, and as a reader I didn't believe that she had a reason not to mention it until then. I wrote some more spoiler-filled thoughts in this comment.
Overall, I dug the frontier vibes, folks learning to trust and care for strangers (literally, people who are strange to them), the horror elements, and the focus on variously marginalized folks trying to get by and coming together in sisterhood.
