Starred review from February 20, 2023
Moore (In the Cut) returns with a bracing and daring account of a woman who tries to build a new life on the American frontier. In 1855 Rhode Island, narrator Sarah flees her abusive husband for the Minnesota Territory, where she hopes to join her friend Maddie. After reaching the Erie Canal port in Albany and nearly out of money, she boards a freighter and arrives dirty and hungry in Shakopee, where she learns Maddie has died. After wondering how she’ll survive in the remote trading post, she sets her sights on a hard-drinking doctor named Brinton, who is “a bit conceited” and lacks imagination but is fair-minded and relatively gentlemanly. They marry and Brinton gets a job at the Mankato Indian Agency, where Brinton learns new treatments from the Santee people on the nearby reservation and saves many of their lives. In 1862, the Agency refuses to pay the Santee annuities after swindling them out of their land, and a Mdewakanton chief mounts an uprising. Sarah is captured along with her two children. Amid horrors and depravity at the Mdewakanton camp, where trust between the white people and the Mdewakanton quickly erodes, Sarah must make difficult decisions for her survival. Despite the economy of Sarah’s urgent narration, which reads like hurried diary entries, Moore finds room for many striking observations, such as the surreal nature of a massacre: “It all seemed very reasonable and orderly, the way events in dreams make sense.” This is a masterwork of Americana. Agent: Emma Paterson, Aitken Alexander Associates.
