A- #AudioBookReview: Battle of the Round House by Tananarive Due

Battle of the Round House (Magic & Mystery, #6) by Tananarive Due
Narrator: Joniece Abbott-Pratt
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, fantasy, fantasy mystery, historical fantasy, horror, Weird West
Series: Magic & Mystery #6
Pages: 65
Length: 1 hour and 56 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on July 28, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

This spellbinding short story from the award-winning author of The Reformatory reimagines the Wild West through the eyes of a young Black girl with a gift.
1871: Ten-year-old Lucy Freeman and her family flee threats in Kentucky for a new life in the post–Civil War frontier. Their refuge is Zipporah Ranch, a hidden settlement founded by Black women and children that thrives, if the folktales are true, on magic. But a mob of bounty hunters is bringing hell to paradise, and it’s Lucy’s own secret magical ability that may be the only defense.
Tananarive Due’s Battle of the Round House is part of the Magic & Mystery collection, puzzle-box mysteries from top fantasy authors. They can be read or listened to in one enchanting sitting.

My Review:

Battle of the Round House is a story within a story. It’s also a bit of fictionalized reality nestled inside a framing story that is ALSO fictionalized reality. And I loved the way it worked.

It begins with that first bit of reality, of 75-year old Lucy Freeman, in 1936, participating in an oral history project that really existed as part of FDR’s Depression-era Works Progress Administration, otherwise known as the WPA.

A young member of the Writers’ Project intended to interview Miss Freeman about her encounter with Marshal James “Wild Bill” Hickok, a meeting that occurred in 1871, when Lucy was around ten years old.

The Writers’ Project worker believes that Lucy is going to provide information – or illumination – about a missing persons case that Hickok documented as requiring no further investigation. Not that it was solved or resolved, but that it wasn’t worth his or anyone else’s time to establish the exact cause of the disappearance of a known gang of cutthroats, murderers and horse thieves.

The young writer probably thinks that she’s going to get a bit of a story to add to the legends around “Wild Bill” Hickok. Which she does, but not the kind of story that she expected.

What she learns from Lucy Freeman is the story of a town that existed on no map, that protected itself from all who would attempt its destruction. A town that Lucy helped to save – with a touch of magic.

Escape Rating A-: This sixth story in the Magic & Mystery collection doesn’t quite embody the series. There is magic, of the magical realism variety, but there’s no mystery. Hickok knows perfectly well what happened to the Bandera Boys gang, and is more than happy to help bury that truth.

The story itself is a combination of Weird West fantasy and historical horror. The Weird West already borders on horror, as the weird parts of that equation tend to veer into the darker parts of the supernatural. But in the case of this story, that historical horror refers not to the kinds of fictional horror that are associated with a time period, such as Victorian Gothic, but instead to the kind of horror that was all too horribly real AND part of real history.

Lucy Freeman and her family were Black. Her father was a freedman, a successful blacksmith in Lexington during the Civil War. His brother and that side of the family had founded a Black and Native settlement close to Abilene Kansas, and invited him and his family to join them. Lucy’s story begins with her family on the harrowing journey, after they’ve been forced off the train and are in the midst of a 100 mile wagon trek, pursued by a gang of thieves armed with guns AND a fake “Wanted” poster for her father.

The dangers are, and were, real. If their horse dies, they’re dead. If the gang catches up with them, they’re dead. If the gang convinces a sheriff along the way to organize a posse, they’re dead. And no one will help them and there’s no possibility of justice – and they ALL know it and so does the reader.

They reach safety, but the gang is determined to destroy the whole settlement. Because they’re jealous of the prosperity and can’t abide the thought that anyone non-white might have something they don’t. It’s ugly, it’s dirty, it’s disgusting, and it’s all too believable.

So the horror of the story is in the situation. It’s not body horror, or monster horror (except the two-legged kind) or any of the standard horror tropes. It’s horror because that’s the way that history really was, and it’s all the more horrifying for it.

But the darkness of the night and of the battle fought within it is brightened by that touch of magic. Specifically Lucy’s magic. A magic that allows her to help people listen to their brighter angels, even if just for a second. A magic that can also tell a herd of rampaging bulls that Lucy deserves their protection – and that the men attacking their home do not.

That Lucy manages to give the young WPA writer the tiniest glimpse of that magic to discover for herself leaves the story, and the reader, with a brilliant spark of hope. A marvelous ending to a compelling and captivating tale, made just that bit more fascinating through the narrative talent of Joniece Abbott-Pratt.

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