Battle of the Round House

by Tananarive Due

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.

Genres: Fantasy, Short Stories, Historical Fiction, Audiobook, Fiction, Mystery, Historical

65 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 28, 2026

About the author

TANANARIVE DUE (tah-nah-nah-REEVE doo) is the award-winning author of The Wishing Pool & Other Stories and the upcoming The Reformatory ("A masterpiece"--Library Journal). She and her husband, Steven Barnes, co-wrote the Black Horror graphic novel The Keeper, illustrated by Marco Finnegan. Due and Barnes co-host a podcast, "Lifewriting: Write for Your Life!"

A leading voice in Black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. She and her husband live with their son, Jason.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 4.25 out of 5]

𝜗𝜚⋆₊˚ Another great short story in this series! Everything about this was so interesting and nerve-wracking and so, so good. I was hoping and praying nothing bad would happen to Lucy and her family as they journeyed to Zipporah Ranch. The writing was so damn good, and the plot kept me on the edge of my seat. And after I finished the story, I didn't feel like I was missing something, nor did I feel unsatisfied with how short it was. It was basically perfect. 👌🏼

All in all, I really enjoyed this, and now I not only want to read the author's full-length novels, I need to read them. 🤭🧡

࣪ ִֶָ☾. Thank you to Amazon Original Stories and NetGalley for providing the arc in exchange for an honest review! All opinions and statements are my own. ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

──── ୨୧ ────

The Magic & Mystery Collection
#1 The Wednesday Witches Book Club
#2 Miss Gentle and The Case of the Very Flat Monk
#3 The Lion's Tusk
#4 A Labyrinth of Honeybees
#5 The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious
#7 The Cairndale Orphan

[Sadie Hartmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Title/Author: Battle of the Round House by Tananarive Due

Format Read: eBook (audio comes with it)

Pub date: July 28th, 2026

Publisher: Amazon Originals *you can read my thoughts on Amazon on my Substack

Page Count: takes about an hour to listen to it/65 pages (less than an hour to read it)

Link: https://a.co/d/0iyMIE1D

Recommended for readers who enjoy:

-Due's unique and personal connection to the historical fiction she writes

-Short stories, character-driven, scenic, immersive/If you enjoyed her short story collections, Ghost Summer and The Wishing Pool

-Child POV (the MC is a 12-year-old girl with a *special gift

-Westerns

-ANIMAL LOVER! If you love farm animals, bulls, and horses-Due treats them with so much love and respect and care

-A little magical realism

__

Minor complaints:

-I didn't want to leave Zipporah Ranch, 64 pages was not enough!

Final recommendation:

"My family history led directly to my creation of Zipporah Ranch. I only added the Wild West, cattle . . . and a little magic." --Tananarive Due (author's notes)

"we all surely would have lost our lives if not for a little magic."

This was everything I wanted it to be and more; a satisfying time sitting at the feet of one of my all-time favorite storytellers. I think Due is especially gifted with a child's POV and short fiction. I'm already suited for modern Westerns/Frontier because I grew up watching shows like Little House and Bonanza. I also read a lot of Weird Westerns with Horror/Supernatural elements.

This story follows a family headed to a thriving ranch community with a hostile hunting party on their tail. Zipporah Ranch is a haven and I would live there in a heartbeat; strong, capable women, self sustainable, and an intentional posture of respect and care for the tending and nurturing of animals. The words "horror" and "terror" are used all throughout this short story because the nightmare of enslavement, racism, and an oppression will always haunt the annals of history-real or fiction. She doesn't ever shy away from these themes-she brings them into her fiction no matter which genre the story falls into.

My favorite aspect of this story was the treatment of animals, it made my heart so happy.

My only complaint is that I was sad to leave the refuge of this tale.


Comps: Ghost Summer & The Wishing Pool by Tananarive Due
Amid the Vastness of All Else by C. S. Humble

Here are my Kindle Highlights on this story

[vaishnavi ☆ﾟ⁠.⁠* · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great one from the Magic & Mystery collection! We follow a young Lucy Freeman and her family as they escape Kentucky to live at the Zipporah Ranch, a secret settlement built by Black women. Lucy's povs from when she is ten years old was really well done. Logically speaking, you know that the Freemans made it to Zipporah Ranch safely, and that they lived there with the others, because one half of the book is her being interviewed at age 75. But the writing was so immersive, it really makes you feel the tension and the fear the family felt. I was nervous the entire time I was reading this, which again, is a testament to the writing style.

[Melanie (meltotheany) · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC provided by the publisher via Netgalley

✰ the collection on amazon
✰ the collection on goodreads

this story is told via transcripts from a seventy-five-year-old woman, named lucy, in 1936, who is telling their account of what happened to twelve missing men in 1871 (also transcribed in the kansas archives), when she was only ten-years-old and her family were trying to get to a black founded cattle ranch to start a new, safer life. on the journey of 100 miles, they become the newest targets of racist highway men, and then we see young lucy and her family in another town, before they embark to the safety of the hidden zipporah ranch. yet, maybe they are still being followed. oh, and maybe lucy also has some persuasion magic, too.

i really enjoyed this, i really loved lucy’s voice as a child and an elder, and i really wish this was full-length. this is the scariest of the collection, but also one of the bright shining lights of it, and i overwhelmingly recommend this one!

trigger + content warnings: racism, racist slurs, talk of slavery, child abuse in past mention, mention of ptsd, grief, loss of child (six month older sibling) in past, animal death (shot stray dog), blood

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♡ Magic & Mystery Amazon Collection Reviews:
➛ Miss Gentle and the Case of the Very Flat Monk by Travis Baldree
➛ The Wednesday Witches Book Club By Sarah Beth Durst
➛ The Lion’s Tusk By Robert Jackson Bennett
➛ A Labyrinth of Honeybees By Heather Fawcett
➛ The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious By Scott Lynch
➛ Battle of the Round House By Tananarive Due
➛ The Cairndale Orphan By J. M. Miro

[Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tananarive Due’s storytelling is so 🔥🔥🔥🔥 this was so damn good. Only 61 pages

A story based on oral stories passed down in Tananarive’s Family about “Round House Battles” in 1857.

The Zipporah Ranch. A hidden Black Ranch founded by Women…surrounded by magic. When Lucy and her family is now on the run from white bounty Hunters who followed them to the ranch…. THEY MUST PROTECT THEIR LAND.

[Natalie all_books_great_and_small · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via netgalley and the publishers.

Battle of the Round House is a captivating short story about a young black girl, Lucy Freeman, in 1871 and follows her and her family's escape from Kentucky towards a new life at the Zipporah Ranch in the post-civil war frontier.
Zipporah Ranch is a thriving community settlement that was founded by black women and children and is rumoured to contain magic too. But just as the family escape the clutches of bounty hunters and reach the Ranch, the hunters are not far behind them and once they catch up they become a huge threat not just to Lucy and her family, but the whole community. This stirs up a secret magical ability inside Lucy herself and as this unfolds itself, becomes the best defence they have.
This is my first read by this author but I have wanted to read the Reformetory for ages and will definitely be bumping that to the top of my list to get soon. The writing is immersive and even though it is a short read/listen, it sure whisks you away and each character was well fleshed out and interesting. The narrator Joniece Abbott-Pratt was a perfect fit for this book and her voice breathed so much life and soul into the book making it even more captivating from the first paragraph all the way through.

[TL *Humaning the Best She Can* · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for free with Kindle Unlimited and Audible audio (Amazon original stories)
🌟 🤩 ⭐️ 🌠 💫
----

Enjoyable story and good characters but would have loved to see more of the magic aspect and dig deeper into it.

Well done and all that but wish it had been a bit longer.

[Books_the_Magical_Fruit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Due has been on my to-read list, and she jumped up pretty close to the top a few months ago, when I watched a YouTube video that she posted where she performed the “Thriller” dance by Michael Jackson. How cool is Tananarive Due?? (Learning that choreography has been on my bucket list for a long time, but, alas, I have zero coordination when it comes to dancing.)

Anyway, this short story was a great introduction to Due, and I loved the magical realism in it. It’s set in 1871, when folks are traveling west to start new lives, and the “law” usually consists of a sheriff and a deputy who cannot do it all by themselves. Therefore, bandits are common, and a posse of bandits are after the Freeman family, who have dared to exist and travel while being black. Some bounty hunters are searching for the patriarch of said family, even though he has an ironclad alibi, and the latter stop in a town to plead innocence to the sheriff there. The Freemans are searching for Zipporah Ranch, a settlement where they can live peacefully with other POC. In their haste to get away from the bounty hunters, the Freemans have lost, among many other things, their map to the ranch, the location of which is a closely-guarded secret. Luckily, the sheriff knows the way and privately gives them directions…but a horse and wagon leave a distinct trail, and the Freemans are not the only ones in search of the ranch…

This is a quick, informative read, and Due paints a picture of what life was like back then for anyone who wasn’t a white man (UGH). I recommend you pick this one up (that is to say, buy the kindle version)!

Thank you to NetGalley and Amazon Original Stories for an eARC. All opinions are mine.

[WHL (Bill) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short story is A powerful mix of horror, history, and the supernatural. I love how she weaves Black history into a tense, unsettling story. Another solid read from Due!

[aria ✧ · Rating 4 out of 5]

── 4.0✦

I definitely need to read more by this author

[Abigail McKenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5 stars. oh how I love "wild west but with fantasy" stories! it was hard to get a read on who the target audience was. it very much read like a middle-grade, but with far more intensity than I'd hand to a kid. it was interesting, though, and I'm not mad that I've read it.

**content warnings for racism and violence

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I had read the e-book of this one. I know the audiobook performance ruined a lot of it for me. (I can't deal with audiobook narrators who put so much melodramatic emoting into their performances during just regular narration/internal monologue. It's grating tonally, and it always comes off false to me. Here it's Joniece Abbott-Pratt, and I also can't listen to Natalie Naudus anymore for the same reason.)

But anyway, as always Tananarive Due knows how to tell a story. I'm a little bit puzzled that there appears to be no mystery in here whatsoever, and this is a fantasy/mystery collection, but I can't complain when we get such a fun story as a result.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really loved this story about a newly emancipated family making their way west to an all Black ranch. Supernatural Wild West FTW.

[Karen ⚜Mess⚜ · Rating 2 out of 5]

From the Magic and Mystery collection.

I don't think Tananarive understood the assignment.

[labibliofille · Rating 5 out of 5]

Battle of the Round House is SO GOOD for a short story/novella! Filled with intriguing simplistic magic, action, historical aspects, and culture, BotRH really had my buy-in from the get go. I'm OBSESSED and absolutely prioririzing Tananarive Due's backlist books after giving this one a listen. I already had The Reformatory on my never-ending TBR, but I relaly want to try to read it this autumn!

[Brok3n · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review of Battle of the Round House by Tananarive Due:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Krystle · Rating 4.25 out of 5]

Brilliant story teller!

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one is less “mystery” more “magic” with a feeling of an old western story.

Magic and Mystery Collection:
Miss Gentle and the Case of the Very Flat Monk - Travis Baldree ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
The Wednesday Witches Book Club - Sarah Beth Durst ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
The Lion’s Tusk - Robert Jackson Bennett ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
A Labyrinth of Honeybees - Heather Fawcett ⭐️⭐️💫
The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious- Scott Lynch ⭐️⭐️
Battle of the Round House - Tananarive Due ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Cairndale Orphan - J.M. Miro ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[Rustic Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is very different from the other stories I've read in the Magic & Mystery collection so far (The Lion's Tusk, Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious, Miss Gentle and the Case of the Very Flat Monk, A Labyrinth of Honeybees).

It's neither a straight up a whodunit murder mystery nor is it set in a completely fantasy world. It feels like more like a magical realism story set up in the past, like her The Reformatory and it's really a great one. I like the framing of the story mostly told in "flashbacks", we also have a very short story line with Lucy being interviewed in the modern day.

[Eric Novello]

Um conto longo baseado num relato real de antepassados da Tananarive Due. Uma família que está sendo perseguida procura um rancho, Zipporah, mantido por pessoas negras para se estabelecer. O rancho é tido como lenda por alguns, mas a família de Lucy, a protagonista de dez anos de idade, sabe ser real. Com um pouco menos de certeza, Lucy Freeman suspeita ser capaz de sugestionar as decisões das pessoas próximas "sussurrando" pedidos para a mente delas. No fim do conto, numa situação de tensão e violência dessas em que tudo pode dar errado, ela terá uma chance de descobrir se seu dom é real (ou não).

Da mesma forma que acontece no maravilhoso "The Reformatory", tijolão de horror com assombrações da autora, "Battle of the Round House" também une trama com comentário sobre o racismo sofrido por pessoas negras nos EUA. Mas diferente de The Reformatory, que tem uma série de momentos pesados, Round House possui um tom mais leve mesmo quando o bicho está pegando.

[ReadWithRyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short story by Tananarive Due? Sign me up. I hadn’t heard of this or seen anyone talking about it but I do like browsing the Amazon Original Stories collection from time to time and this cover stood out instantly.

As usual her descriptive writing creates the imagery so well that it felt like I was watching it happen. And again based on the history of her family which just adds that special touch. Really quick and enjoyable read.

[Amanda F · Rating 5 out of 5]

This made me fall in love with this family and genuinely got so stressed during this story. I will be heading out now to find more writing from this author. Just wonderful!!

[Carm · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who generally bounces off historical fiction and doesn't hold Amazon short stories to a particularly high standard, I was pleasantly surprised by this one. I know that doesn't sound like praise… but I promise it is. 😅

[Stephi · Rating 3 out of 5]

really cool setting and atmosphere. would have loved for the magic to be explored more.

3.65 stars

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love how this was framed. This is so good.

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Okay, to be perfectly frank, this is probably the most solid literary work of fiction within the collection and I can recognise it as a story well-crafted and well-told without it precisely appealing to me, personally.

My rating does reflect my enjoyment of the story though. I'm sorry, but it wasn't quite my cup of tea, no matter how great a work of a short story it was.

[Marisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the setting and characters. However, I'm not sure this story fit this collection. There was no mystery and very little fantasy. It felt more like a historical fiction or literary novel that features a small speculative element. I think because I kept waiting for more of both of those things that I was left feeling a bit disappointed.

[Christine · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

Of all the stories I've read from this collection so far, this one is probably my favourite. There's just something about the way Tananarive Due writes that draws you in and doesn't let go until you've gotten to the last page.

I loved how this story is told from the perspective of a child who may or may not be magical. The fantasy elements in this novella are on the lighter side, but what the story lacks in the fantastical, it makes up for in terms of world-building and pacing. Much like Due's other work, this piece is lightly based on her own family history, which makes this a very compelling and fleshed out story despite the length.

[Amie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh?

[Ellyn → Allonsythornraxx · Rating 4 out of 5]

21/08/2026
4 ⭐️
I don't usually read historicals, let alone historicals with an American setting, so this was new for me. The only experience I have with this setting/time period is watching Little House on the Prairie when I was a kid, and honestly, as much as I love the Ingels, this was way better! I really enjoyed the writing and how Tananarive Due incorporated magic into the story in a way that made sense.

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