The She Boss: A Western Story

In the isolated reaches of Bear Valley, Hiram Hooker has built a life of comfortable stagnation. His uncle Sebastian Burris has seen enough: at a makeshift trial, he denounces Hiram's laziness and banishes him to San Francisco, where a young man might actually become something. What begins as reluctant departure becomes something else entirely when Hiram encounters Lucy Dalles, a woman whose ambition matches his own confusion about what he wants from life. The California landscape shifts from pastoral wilderness to urban possibility, and Hiram finds himself caught between who he was in that valley and who he might become. Hankins writes with sharp eye for the small cruelties and unexpected kindnesses of class, for the way ambition can look like restlessness and restlessness can look like promise. The She Boss is a Western that understands the West was as much about interior frontiers as external ones.