Your neighbors might not all welcome you, but I promise you they will help you if you need it.' The driver warns Adelaide what she's in for: 'This land is trying to kill every single one of us, let me tell you. She hires a wagon driver to transport her to her property near Big Sandy, a town in the north-central part of the state they're joined on the journey by a family called the Mudges, a single woman with four blind sons. She takes what little she has, including a locked steamer trunk with the family's secret - what she calls her 'burden' - and heads northwest, where she will homestead as a 'lone woman.' (Montana allowed any person to claim homesteads, regardless of gender or race.)

They also have, as Adelaide says, a secret, locked away for years, and that secret is responsible for her parents' gruesome deaths.Īfter the slaying of her parents, Adelaide decides to strike out on her own in Montana, a state she's been fascinated with for years. Her family runs a plum orchard in the area they're one of more than two dozen Black families who moved there to homestead. 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.Īdelaide is 31 years old when the novel begins, living in California's Lucerne Valley in 1915.

It's hard to imagine a darker start to a novel, and Lone Women is indeed infused with creeping dread and chilling horror. She strikes a match, tosses it on the bed, and leaves her old life behind forever. They're both dead, their corpses lying in their bed in the house that Adelaide has just finished dousing with gasoline. 'You kept too many secrets,' Adelaide Henry says to her parents, early in Victor LaValle's new novel Lone Women.

The changeling lavalle novel