Review by Booklist Review
Ginny has recently cheated on her husband, and as friends and family gather to help out on their rugged farm, alcohol turns to bitter violence. Drunk and charged with poisonous masculine energy, led by her husband and encouraged by her sister Ella, the men assault Ginny and leave her for dead. But Ginny doesn't plan to die that easily. Stealing a horse and a rifle, bloody and in pain, she escapes into the wilderness, and the group gives chase over the mountains, hardly knowing what they plan to do when they catch her. This grim novel of revenge has an ironic tone with the surreal touch of a fever dream--the narration dives into the far future, or adopts the point of view of the mules carrying the party's supplies. McLean's novel is equal parts absurd and bleak, a startling story about survival, violence, and the thin divisions between animal and human, perfect for fans of dark, gritty Westerns.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
McLean (Reptile House) returns with a category-defying novel of revenge, survival, and transcendence in modern-day Montana. While Ginny and her husband, Dan, assist a mare with a difficult birth on their ranch, the couple fights bitterly about Ginny's infidelity with a neighbor, Shaw. Locals arrive to help with the foaling, and as the night wears on, drunken arguments turn violent: Dan rapes Ginny, and nearly all of the men do, as well, urged on by her sister, Ella. Presuming Ginny dead, they toss her inert body into the pit for dead livestock. But Ginny survives and emerges with an avenging fury and strikes back at one of her assailants with a plank spiked with nails. Armed with a stolen horse, weapons, provisions, and memories of her tough Granny, she flees into the mountains, hoping to have the authorities bring the men to justice. Hot in pursuit, though, are Dan, Ella, Ella's husband, and two other men. The story of the posse alternates with prehistoric myth, natural history, excerpts from an imaginary western, data from 22nd-century extraterrestrial botanists, and the wise "thoughts" of superintelligent, telepathic mules. But, however provocative, these passages don't manage to integrate with the main narrative. Raw and elemental, searing yet wry, this has much to say on law and lawlessness, sexual politics, and humans' animal nature. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The author of the story collection Reptile House (2015) explores human vengeance and deep time in her first novel. "Once, here, on this high plain, there were only Horse, Bear, Rhino. No words to put to things, no call to put them. But today? Ginny and Dan in the barn, and words like this: 'You fucked me over. You fuckin' fucked me over.' " Ginny and Dan are trying to help a mare give birth to a foal that's too big for her while they argue about the fact that Ginny has been unfaithful to Dan. The opening passage begins with an observation that encompasses the vast sweep of life on this planet and then zooms in on a contemporary scene that's obscene, filthy, and brutal. This is a pretty good preview of what's to come. Ginny and Dan will take increasingly elaborate measures to help their horse survive giving birth. Their community assembles to help them. The gathering turns into a party, and any sense that this is mutual aid--rather than the desire to treat suffering as entertainment--quickly dissipates. Rescuing a mare in distress is simply the excuse that brings together people eager to punish a woman who has transgressed. While it would be a mistake to call this novel a Western, it most definitely engages with ideas about the American West. McLean is innovative in reminding us that humans and other animals inhabit a landscape that other animals occupied first. The meanings we impose are, from the vantage point of life on Earth, neither inevitable nor universal. She is, however, hardly new in interrogating cowboy mythology, and it's hard to not see some of her choices as redundant. It's clear, for example, that her use of the word Indian conveys a perspective and that her characters' conversations about Indigenous people tell us something about them. But there's a point at which an omniscient narrator that's casually racist becomes a slap in the face. And readers will have to decide for themselves if they want to know what comes next in a novel that spends its first 65 pages recounting the ugly details of a single night that ends with a woman being gang-raped and thrown into a pit filled with lime on top of a stillborn foal. Ambitious, inventive, and aggressively repellent. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
