Westward Women

Westward Women (publication day March 10, 2026) by Alice Martin is completely unique–speculative fiction, but in an alternate history way.

It’s 1973, and an epidemic has gripped the United States at the same time as news of Watergate has broken. Women ages 18-35 are gripped with an itch that’s impossible to satisfy–both internal and external. They leave home, headed west to the Pacific. Many never make it, as their disease progresses they become more and more listless and unfocused. If discovered in time, they are hospitalized and sedated. The country believes it’s contagious but the cause is never determined.

Martin tells the interrelated stories of three women–Aimee, a recent college graduate, who leaves to find her best friend, Ginny, who has gone westward. Two other storylines follow Eve, a journalist who is chasing a story about the women and a man named the Piper who collects them on a bus to travel west; and Teenie, a woman on the bus who is trying desperately to keep remembering her sister, Kate, who disappeared years before, presumed abducted right from their backyard.

Martin’s writing is well-done, and it has the feel of When Women Were Dragons, by Kelly Barnhill, or a Margaret Atwood or Naomi Alderman novel, along with the languid, humid feel of a 1970s summer, which seemed to last forever when I was a child. I love road trips, and novels that feature a road trip, and Westward Women accommodates that as Aimee leaves Pennsylvania, and Eve leaves the south, joined by Ginny in the midwest, all of them looking for the Piper, where Aimee thinks Ginny is.

Aimee is plagued by dreams when she is able to sleep, and she visits a doctor, not sure if she’s getting sick or not. But her pupils are normal (the eyes of afflicted women are super-dilated) and it turns out she has tapped into some sort of collective consciousness, seeing what some of the westward women also are seeing.

At first the Piper seems harmless, but after Aimee fakes her way onto the bus, she finds out how dangerous he really is, and though she might not be able to save Ginny (maybe Ginny doesn’t need saving) she may be able to save someone else. Although the climax of the book seemed maybe too coincidental, it was still satisfying, and I enjoyed how Martin tied up all of the loose ends. I recommend it if you’re in the mood for dystopian, alternative history/speculative fiction. It’s weight-neutral, as I didn’t note any instances of explicit or implicit anti-fatness, although there are many descriptions of women’s bodies.