She belonged with the Librarians, and she would prove it.
My first experience with Sarah Gailey’s Wild West novellas was the Hugo-nominated hippo-themed caper, River of Teeth. Gailey’s latest Hugo-nominated novella, Upright Women Wanted, is also set in the Wild West, although a lot further removed from 1890’s Louisiana than you may at first realize.
The story starts with an ongoing nightmare as Esther hides in the back of a wagon, running away from home after her dearest friend Beatriz is executed in front of her for the crime of possessing Unapproved Materials. Esther has her own reasons for thinking that she deserved everything Beatriz got and more, so she’s decided to redeem her own life by joining a worthy cause. Since she can’t fit into the role that society and her powerful father has chosen from her, she’ll instead join the respected public servants distributing Approved Materials, the morally upright women of The Librarians.
The Librarians greet the stowaway with a revolver in the face, telling her to give them a good reason why they shouldn’t just dump her body in the desert. So…morally upright means something very different from what Esther thought.
Gailey has a lovely command of the language, giving the characters just enough of a folksy late-nineteenth century drawl to immerse us in the setting without making it silly or resorting to stereotypes. This is a western adventure that spends more time on details like the proper way to saddle a horse or how to use beef jerky to make a stew than on gun battles. I mean, there are gun battles, it’s just that we see those from Esther’s point of view, focusing on the slow, excruciating lead-up to an attack knowing that, yes, people are about to die while shooting at each other in the middle of a fist fight on horseback. And then having to deal with the memories afterward.
With the armed gangs and horse-drawn wagons and hangings in the public square, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was a historical novel, or possibly an alternate-history. That is until people start mentioning diesel, crumbling asphalt highways, electricity. Planes. It slowly becomes clear that we’re not dealing with the past, but a dystopian future.
This adds a real element of doom to the story, because some of the ideals of this new civilization – the best of the remaining resources are kept for the war effort, knowledge is carefully curated so people only get stories and history that cast The State in a good light, and of course Marriage Is Between A Man And A Woman – are all things that you can already see people pushing for right now.
Esther’s spur-of-the-moment idea to join the Librarians actually puts her in the middle of a small group of eccentric characters who only survive in society by hiding what they are. Head Librarians Bet and Leda are a devoted couple who have been together long enough to know what each other is thinking all the time, and in-your-face take-no-prisoners Apprentice Librarian Cye goes by they in the wilderness and she in the towns and will only wear a skirt if there’s no other option.
When there’s people around who we don’t trust, we let them think we’re the kinds of people who are allowed to exist. And the only kind of Librarian that’s allowed to exist is the one who answers to she.
All of this is a lot much for Esther, who’s getting to see a life she never thought she’d be allowed to have, while she’s running away from that part of herself just as fast as she possibly can. In Esther, Gailey has created a character that I’m sure is sadly common, the person who knows what they want, who they want, and what kind of life will make them happy, while at the same time believing with every fiber of their being that what they are is wrong and giving into it for even a moment will bring down divine retribution.
She would have to dig out that broken part of herself, the part that had made her kiss Beatriz that first time and then every time that came after.
Despite the way the story starts, this is not a tale of revenge, of going back to avenge a lost love, or even something that will go into a lot of detail about how Beatriz and Esther’s life went so wrong. This is a traveling tale, a sneaking through checkpoints and washing things with sand because water is scarce tale. There are gunfights that go by in a blur, and a drawn-out hostage situation where a bad-ass gunfighter woman holds off everyone with a devil-may-care smirk and a gun to someone’s side. It’s also a very satisfying story of Esther realizing that she’s actually good for something and that she actually wants something (and someone), just as soon as she let’s herself get past the idea that the only thing she deserves is to be cursed.