https://medium.com/springboard-thought/whiskey-when-were-dry-a-masterclass-in-subverting-genre-8f2880674cee

“It went on in increments not tallied by any earthly measure. For centuries we wander that snow with their blood running from our elbows.”

Whiskey When We’re Dry is (another) proof positive that subversion of any genre is integral to its growth and value. The tropes, and what we have come to expect from our shaped preferences, is all very well and good from time to time. But the old, when pitted against inclusive and intersectional fiction like this illustrates just how stagnant it is, even if it’s comforting to know where that specific body of water is, so we can avoid it.

Jess’s voice and her story would be reason enough to read this book. Her voice is unique yet retains the same qualities of the familiar. She is the complex “anti-hero” bred akin to most all western protagonists. But unlike those men, she is not made privy in any real way to the world and its workings.

For as long as we’ve been the Good, we’ve invented histories to so convince our children. We heed preachers upon tilted altars. We let them spin this world.

So long as we remain at its center.

The only education Jess receives is a passing familiarity with the Bible, circa 1885. She has no mother to teach her to be a woman and her Pa excels at nothing much at all.

Her dad and her older brother never actually make an effort to see her and relegate her to women's work, stymying her every interest. When her brother Noah grows up some, he collides with the siblings’ father once and for all in about the only way a boy can: a physical confrontation that goes too far. The father is left broken in both face and will, Noah leaves for good, and Jess is left to pick up the pieces of a shattered life.

“…they think a man is made real by the violence he wields.””

It takes the death of a man — her father — to set her free.

Though obviously an unwelcome turn of events, and she tries to make due alone on their spread of land alone, she eventually strikes out to seek out Noah; years behind her sibling though she may be.
To make her way through a man’s world, she must dress the part. Granting her the privilege of passing as a man while growing up a woman places the fiction into a sort of blurred gender perspective. In studying to pass and spending time with men, she is able to feel out where she feels she belongs.

“I held the money in my hand. I couldn’t reckon its weight against the man left behind.”

This lens makes the reader feel like they are also discovering the west for the first time while also sets them slightly on edge, as anything is possible and all bets appear to be off. And no, I do not mean in a typical female protagonist fashion, either: ie, a male writer threatening the female protagonist with rape to illustrate how dark and bad the world and the antagonist are. Thankfully, this fiction is far more substantial. Jess knows the world is hard and the stakes are high, all without the threat of rape, shockingly.

“How could you kill as you have?
The same logic lies dormant within all fairy tales and histories, it is fundamental as our origins, as urgent as our breaths. And yet I will confess the choice was ours.
The choice is always ours.”

When experiencing the world on her own terms, Jess outgrows her past intentions and goals quite quickly. At long last Jess begins to find out all the things she didn’t know. And can then begin her formative years, delayed though they may be.

Her story subverts some tropes and plays into others. But it is made to intersect other characters who are also a little left of center; straight and queer; White, Mexican, Black; masculine and feminine.

“A problem with prosperity is that it makes a place long on crowds and short on people.”
They are all of them constructed as Jessilyn herself, neither hero nor villain; capable of heroic and villainous deeds but skirting the typical labels (even as those labels are sometimes thrown in their face by the people of the world).

Like all great fiction, in its attempt to tell a meaningful story — one which is obviously well researched and steeped in at least some lived experience when it comes to the area of America in which it takes place —it also manages to handily tap a literary vein.

“What started the war, Pa?”

His eyes settled on me. “Stories, Jessilyn, We tell ourselves the wrong stories.”
The prose gradually becomes more complex and, later on, often even profound, a thoroughly enjoyable device.

As Jess’s accrues experience, she becomes wiser. The human condition is tied directly to complex themes. Religion; the responsibility and ethics we have as a culture and people to history; the erasure of people of color and queer people; capitalism; consent; love, in all its forms and shapes.
In doing this Whiskey When We’re Dry illustrates that while this is Jess’s story, it is also the story of many others who have come before, whether history chooses to record them or not.
And what a rich story it is.

“Do you believe sin is handed down, one generation to the next?”
“I reckon it piles like snow.”