Author Anna North takes a new look at the Hole in the Wall Gang

A few months ago, I stumbled across an intriguing new Anna North novel courtesy of the hive mind of Kindle. Not sure if it picked up my online interests in Wyoming or in spec-fict novels or it planted a bug in my celebral cortex to monitor my every thought. But it showed up in Kindle's rec list. 

My reading tastes are catholic (small c) although occasionally Catholic (cap C). My Kindle Library lists titles as disparate as Michael Lewis's non-fiction and scarifying account of the pandemic ("The Premonition") to George Sands' odd novel of 1840s rural France, "La Petite Fadette" (see my March 13 post. Amazon doesn't get all the credit. I read physical books too. Just finished Ann McCutchan's intriguing biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and am deep into C.J. Box's Joe Pickett novel of intrigue in Carbon County, "The Disappeared." Both books by Wyoming writers. 

I was so impressed with "Outlawed" that I wrote a review and sent it off to my editor at Studio Wyoming Review, Camellia El-Antably. She liked it and fired it off to WyoFile where it landed today. Here's the opening with a link to the rest:

Imagine, if you will, that Wyoming’s infamous Hole in the Wall Gang in the late 1890s was composed of young women escaping a post-pandemic totalitarian society. 

That’s the scenario constructed by Anna North in her new revisionist historical novel, “Outlawed.” These “outlaws” were driven from their communities because they couldn't bear children.

North’s imagined society compels women to be fruitful and multiply (in the manner of “The Handmaid’s Tale”). Babies are crucial because, in the 1830s, a pandemic killed nine out of every 10 people. 

Not reproducing in 1894 is a crime, but sometimes nature intervenes in the form of infertility, disease or bad luck. The barren ones are banished or shunted off to convents. Sometimes, infertility coincides with a rash of infant deaths. Those young women get blamed and, when rumors reach a fever pitch, they are hanged as witches. 

So it’s off to Hole in the Wall. If you can arrange it.

Read the rest at Studio Wyoming Review on WyoFile.