i'm trying to wrap up some books that have sat around half-finished for lengths of time i don't care to admit to, and it was very easy to remember why i put this one down.

ada lives in an alternate (but not too strange to us today) past where women are valued only for their ability to reproduce - if they can't or don't have babies, they're deemed witches and run out of town or worse. ada hasn't gotten pregnant in a year of marriage, and is sent to a convent so her husband can remarry and try again. in an effort to further the education her midwife mother gave her, she escapes and takes up with a band of outlaws to try and get to the woman who's written the most influential medical text ada's read.

this book has an interesting premise that ultimately reeks of white feminism. instead of questioning why women's value is tied to their ability to have babies in the first place, ada simply sets out to prove that not all women can have children, and sometimes the fact that they haven't gotten pregnant isn't their fault. the outlaws she falls in with are a group of queer women and gender non-conforming people of various races whom ada repeatedly puts into intense danger with her ignorance, and their repeated traumas only serve to educate ada and push her story forward.

none of the things that happen to The Kid's band - horrors that ada witnesses or past agonies that they reveal to her - ever cause ada to question the cis gender normativity of the world she lives in, understanding, of course, that she likely wouldn't have had the vocabulary for this. a novel that promised a feminist rethinking of the old west does nothing of the sort.