North has a penchant for slowing time way down so we really experience every nervous second as Ada. I think the most heinous of all was the promise and then subsequent lack of action. It felt as if Ada was talking to the same person over and over. None of them are shy, or use slang, or have a bubbly personality, or a subdued personality, etc. Every woman talks with the same kind of easy confidence. It’s hard to pinpoint why exactly, but I think it’s because their dialogue is very similar. They didn’t have enough of their own “voice” for me to be able to distinguish one from another. Even though I could name each one and list their job title, I often mixed them up.
The other characters felt interchangeable. The Kid was even frequently annoyed with Ada and yet entirely reliant on her as the doctor of the Gang. I was constantly waiting for The Kid and Ada to have some sort of connecting moment– in fact, North seemed to be pushing us in that direction– but the moment never came. I think the most solid evidence of this was the leader of the Hole in the Wall Gang, “The Kid.” I wanted The Kid to be my favorite character, and yet they had absolutely no chemistry with Ada. The characters and the story were perpetually on the cusp of being very likeable, but I found that by the end of the novel, none of them really were. It technically hits its mark, but the feeling is comparable to the expectation that you’re going to get some “really great chocolate” and then receiving a single m&m. That sounds amazing, no? One reviewer even described it as a beautiful, “ cottagecore“-esque read (which I highly disagree with). Outlawed was advertised to me as a queer wild west adventure with cool women outlaws. I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t tell the characters apart, who found Ada a little bland, and who thought the book didn’t do with its genre what it could have done. I thought couldn’t put my finger on why this book was difficult for me to get through until I read other’s reviews of it and found actually, I could.
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