Genre Fiction
![Claudia Cravens - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B0BHZTXPJG.jpg)
Lucky Red: A Novel
A cinematic debut set in the American West about a scrappy orphan bent on making her own luck-and finding friendship, romance, and her true calling along the way
"Queer, feminist, subversive, and a good old-fashioned freight train of an adventure story."-Sara Nović, author of True Biz
The heart wants what it wants. Saddle up, ride out, and claim it.
It's the spring of 1877 and sixteen-year-old Bridget is already disillusioned when she arrives penniless in Dodge City with only her wits to keep her alive. Thanks to the allure of her bright red hair and country-girl beauty, she's recruited to work at the Buffalo Queen, the only brothel in town run by women. Bridget takes to brothel life, appreciating the good food, good pay, and good friendships she forms with her fellow "sporting women."
But as winter approaches, Bridget learns just how fleeting stability can be. With the arrival of out-of-towners-some ominous and downright menacing, others more alluring but potentially dangerous in their own ways, including a legendary female gunfighter who steals Bridget's heart-tensions in Dodge City run high. When the Buffalo Queen's peace and stability are threatened, Bridget must decide what she owes to the people she loves and what it looks like to claim her own destiny.
A thoroughly modern reimagining of the Western genre, Lucky Red is a masterfully crafted, propulsive tale of adventure, loyalty, desire, and love.
"Queer, feminist, subversive, and a good old-fashioned freight train of an adventure story."-Sara Nović, author of True Biz
The heart wants what it wants. Saddle up, ride out, and claim it.
It's the spring of 1877 and sixteen-year-old Bridget is already disillusioned when she arrives penniless in Dodge City with only her wits to keep her alive. Thanks to the allure of her bright red hair and country-girl beauty, she's recruited to work at the Buffalo Queen, the only brothel in town run by women. Bridget takes to brothel life, appreciating the good food, good pay, and good friendships she forms with her fellow "sporting women."
But as winter approaches, Bridget learns just how fleeting stability can be. With the arrival of out-of-towners-some ominous and downright menacing, others more alluring but potentially dangerous in their own ways, including a legendary female gunfighter who steals Bridget's heart-tensions in Dodge City run high. When the Buffalo Queen's peace and stability are threatened, Bridget must decide what she owes to the people she loves and what it looks like to claim her own destiny.
A thoroughly modern reimagining of the Western genre, Lucky Red is a masterfully crafted, propulsive tale of adventure, loyalty, desire, and love.
Editorial Reviews
"Lucky Red is the Western I never knew I needed-where all the most fascinating misfit characters usually pushed to the fringes take their rightful places center stage. Claudia Cravens strikes the perfect balance here-queer, feminist, subversive, and a good old-fashioned freight train of an adventure story."-Sara Nović, author of True Biz
"I dare anyone not to thrill to this book! Lucky Red takes the Western genre and shakes the life back into it. Explosive and intimate, dense with human connection, and above all seized with the need for freedom of the queer self: This is storytelling that grinds its characters in its grip, then throws them into the air to take wondrous flight. I loved it to bits."-Shelley Parker-Chan, author of She Who Became the Sun
"A subversive take on Western fiction: a deftly told, absorbing coming-of-age story about a young woman's life in a Dodge City brothel, and one of the most heartfelt and thrilling books I've read in ages."-Lauren Wilkinson, author of American Spy
"A thrilling and surprising story of deep human hunger and desire, the ache that lives in all of us, and the sometimes violent lengths that we will go to feel seen and loved and understood."-Lynn Steger Strong, author of Flight
"A renegade Western alternating between lonely darkness, feverish desire, and thrilling action, Lucky Red made for such cinematic reading that I forgot it was a book!"-Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face
"Cravens debuts with an exceptional historical tale of sex work and queer desire on the American frontier. . . . Cravens peppers the thrilling plot with delicious language (Bridget's clients are ‘a series of hats and mustaches'; Jim's marriage offer feels ‘wedged in [her] chest, like a piece of furniture that can't be got through a doorway'), and her sensitive portrayal of Bridget's uncertainty over her sexuality resonates. This is a knockout."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Let's reexamine the lives of women in the Wild West, shall we? . . . The world of the Buffalo Queen an...
"I dare anyone not to thrill to this book! Lucky Red takes the Western genre and shakes the life back into it. Explosive and intimate, dense with human connection, and above all seized with the need for freedom of the queer self: This is storytelling that grinds its characters in its grip, then throws them into the air to take wondrous flight. I loved it to bits."-Shelley Parker-Chan, author of She Who Became the Sun
"A subversive take on Western fiction: a deftly told, absorbing coming-of-age story about a young woman's life in a Dodge City brothel, and one of the most heartfelt and thrilling books I've read in ages."-Lauren Wilkinson, author of American Spy
"A thrilling and surprising story of deep human hunger and desire, the ache that lives in all of us, and the sometimes violent lengths that we will go to feel seen and loved and understood."-Lynn Steger Strong, author of Flight
"A renegade Western alternating between lonely darkness, feverish desire, and thrilling action, Lucky Red made for such cinematic reading that I forgot it was a book!"-Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face
"Cravens debuts with an exceptional historical tale of sex work and queer desire on the American frontier. . . . Cravens peppers the thrilling plot with delicious language (Bridget's clients are ‘a series of hats and mustaches'; Jim's marriage offer feels ‘wedged in [her] chest, like a piece of furniture that can't be got through a doorway'), and her sensitive portrayal of Bridget's uncertainty over her sexuality resonates. This is a knockout."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Let's reexamine the lives of women in the Wild West, shall we? . . . The world of the Buffalo Queen an...
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
Some years ago, in Dodge, I was a sporting woman. This was before I took up my current trade, back when the prairie ran with cattle like a river runs with fish. It's different now, of course, but then, so am I. I didn't mind whoring-it can be good work in the right house-but it demands a great deal of keeping still, and I'm one of those itchy, fidgety sorts who's always looking out the window or glancing toward the door, so it was only a matter of time until I had to move on. Most rambling types like to act as if they just woke up one morning and lit out, turning their backs to all and sundry, but this is just good storytelling. The truth is that making your own way happens piecemeal, like a baby who scoots, then crawls, then eventually toddles her way right out the cabin door where she's as likely to be snatched up by coyotes as she is to seek her fortune; either way, once she gets loose, there'll be no getting her back. All of which is to say that though I ended up a pretty girl in boy's clothes, mounted like a woman and armed like a man, I started much smaller and simpler, and mostly alone.
Before I was a whore in Kansas, I was a poor drunkard's daughter in Arkansas. My pa wasn't a bad man, but it was far too easy for circumstances to get the upper hand on him. He called himself unlucky, but the losing hands dealt him were too frequent and too numerous to be mere turns of fate. I will admit that at times, events truly were beyond his control: first Ma died having me, then came the Brothers War, then he was on the losing side, and then he lost what was left of the farm to nursing his broken heart. But there were other misadventures that showed me, if not him, that there's more to this life than luck, even bad luck.
First there were the mustangs, which he bought cheap and wild but lacked the will to break and was forced to sell off cheaper and wilder. Then the sheep flock, whose feed he let rot so they all went mad when they ate it. When we finally had to slaughter them, the screaming clatter of blood and terror seemed to thrust him back to some Virginian hellscape, for halfway through he threw aside his knife and shot the rest as fast as he could. In between, there were crates of plow-blades that wouldn't hold an edge, barrels of discarded horseshoes, bales of kinked wire, all manner of flotsam that somehow always cost more than it made. He told himself he was getting by on his wits, when most of the time it was my willingness to scrub linens, tote water, and muck out horse barns that kept our souls inside of our bodies.
When I wasn't hiring myself out on odd jobs, I was usually standing in the doorway of our small cabin on the edge of Fort Smith, from whence I watched the sunsets and periodically wondered if my pa had finally gone off for good. He was a restless soul, and his absences always mixed me up bad. There was the fear that comes from being alone-I was just sixteen and getting a little too ripe to be left unguarded-the snapping awake at every shift in the wind outside only to stare into the blue-black darkness and wait with bated breath for nothing to happen. There was the righteous fury at having been forgotten, as though I, his child and only living kin, was no more memorable than a cracked jug or a harness with a broken strap. This fury would surge up unannounced: suddenly I'd find myself slamming down buckets only to slosh water over my feet, wringing wet linens like turkey necks, shoveling horse shit like I was digging one grave to hold all of my enemies. And then there was relief, the sole proprietorship over my supper, the break from caring for the one person left on this earth who should have cared for me.
We always scraped together just enough to keep us in that little house at the far reaches of the town. I would watch for Pa's return, going about my chores with half an eye on the cabin door, propped open during the warm months to admit the evening. I couldn't tell you what he did when he was gone; he'd just disappear, leaving me to scratch out a few pennies doing other folks' chores, and come back whenever he'd a mind to, half singing a loop of some dirty song he'd learned long ago in the army. He'd roar for cornbread or a fire, but when I couldn't produce them he never got rough, just sad. The cold, blue reflection of the empty hearth would pierce through the fog of liquor in some way that the sun, or I, never could, and for a moment he would understand that he was a disgrace, supported by a daughter who pitched hay and scrubbed petticoats, and greasy, overlarge tears would well up in his eyes. If I didn't move quickly to cheer him up with a song or a joke he'd set to weeping, which only required more soothing and petting to tame down. Once he...
Some years ago, in Dodge, I was a sporting woman. This was before I took up my current trade, back when the prairie ran with cattle like a river runs with fish. It's different now, of course, but then, so am I. I didn't mind whoring-it can be good work in the right house-but it demands a great deal of keeping still, and I'm one of those itchy, fidgety sorts who's always looking out the window or glancing toward the door, so it was only a matter of time until I had to move on. Most rambling types like to act as if they just woke up one morning and lit out, turning their backs to all and sundry, but this is just good storytelling. The truth is that making your own way happens piecemeal, like a baby who scoots, then crawls, then eventually toddles her way right out the cabin door where she's as likely to be snatched up by coyotes as she is to seek her fortune; either way, once she gets loose, there'll be no getting her back. All of which is to say that though I ended up a pretty girl in boy's clothes, mounted like a woman and armed like a man, I started much smaller and simpler, and mostly alone.
Before I was a whore in Kansas, I was a poor drunkard's daughter in Arkansas. My pa wasn't a bad man, but it was far too easy for circumstances to get the upper hand on him. He called himself unlucky, but the losing hands dealt him were too frequent and too numerous to be mere turns of fate. I will admit that at times, events truly were beyond his control: first Ma died having me, then came the Brothers War, then he was on the losing side, and then he lost what was left of the farm to nursing his broken heart. But there were other misadventures that showed me, if not him, that there's more to this life than luck, even bad luck.
First there were the mustangs, which he bought cheap and wild but lacked the will to break and was forced to sell off cheaper and wilder. Then the sheep flock, whose feed he let rot so they all went mad when they ate it. When we finally had to slaughter them, the screaming clatter of blood and terror seemed to thrust him back to some Virginian hellscape, for halfway through he threw aside his knife and shot the rest as fast as he could. In between, there were crates of plow-blades that wouldn't hold an edge, barrels of discarded horseshoes, bales of kinked wire, all manner of flotsam that somehow always cost more than it made. He told himself he was getting by on his wits, when most of the time it was my willingness to scrub linens, tote water, and muck out horse barns that kept our souls inside of our bodies.
When I wasn't hiring myself out on odd jobs, I was usually standing in the doorway of our small cabin on the edge of Fort Smith, from whence I watched the sunsets and periodically wondered if my pa had finally gone off for good. He was a restless soul, and his absences always mixed me up bad. There was the fear that comes from being alone-I was just sixteen and getting a little too ripe to be left unguarded-the snapping awake at every shift in the wind outside only to stare into the blue-black darkness and wait with bated breath for nothing to happen. There was the righteous fury at having been forgotten, as though I, his child and only living kin, was no more memorable than a cracked jug or a harness with a broken strap. This fury would surge up unannounced: suddenly I'd find myself slamming down buckets only to slosh water over my feet, wringing wet linens like turkey necks, shoveling horse shit like I was digging one grave to hold all of my enemies. And then there was relief, the sole proprietorship over my supper, the break from caring for the one person left on this earth who should have cared for me.
We always scraped together just enough to keep us in that little house at the far reaches of the town. I would watch for Pa's return, going about my chores with half an eye on the cabin door, propped open during the warm months to admit the evening. I couldn't tell you what he did when he was gone; he'd just disappear, leaving me to scratch out a few pennies doing other folks' chores, and come back whenever he'd a mind to, half singing a loop of some dirty song he'd learned long ago in the army. He'd roar for cornbread or a fire, but when I couldn't produce them he never got rough, just sad. The cold, blue reflection of the empty hearth would pierce through the fog of liquor in some way that the sun, or I, never could, and for a moment he would understand that he was a disgrace, supported by a daughter who pitched hay and scrubbed petticoats, and greasy, overlarge tears would well up in his eyes. If I didn't move quickly to cheer him up with a song or a joke he'd set to weeping, which only required more soothing and petting to tame down. Once he...
