The challenge is to imagine a world where categories, expectations, and conventions of American life collapse enough to birth real change. In the end, though, the novel is breathtaking in its recalibration of gender roles. But the land was still claimed by Whiteness. The author of America Pacifica, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. This time the dry earth was hard fought by women, yes, and women trying to rewrite history on their terms. Anna North is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic, Glimmer Train, Nautilus, and Salon on Jezebel and BuzzFeed and in the New York Times, where she is a staff editor. Race, class, and gender are all on Ada’s mind, but the power structures where those things intersect occasionally get lost. North’s rendering of race is less sure-footed. North renders a dazzling landscape, punctuated by a musicality that lulls you like a folk song. Fans of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are in for a stellar ride where gender roles, sexuality, agency, and self discovery come together, making North’s story as experimental and novel as it is classic. The results in North’s tale are varied and breathe new life into the Western format. There’s always a test involved when a stunt of this kind is pulled: will it hold up on its face as a compelling story?. On its premise it’s an exciting idea: a classic American tale with the script flipped starring a woman as the leading man.
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