Category Archives: Gay & Lesbian Fiction

Wolf-lovin’ under a full Moon… then a rant

  By cmixgeek | May 10, 2013 - 7:11 am | Fantasy, Gay & Lesbian Fiction
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Lunatic Fringe by Allison Moon has a lot going for it.  It has supernatural occurrences and mystery.  It has lesbomance and politics.  It has characters defined through action and dialog.  But the most important thing this novel has going for it is Allison Moon herself.  Moon manages to be artistic while being succinct.  The reader will not find many rambling compound sentences or quirky stream-of-consciousness musings in Lunatic Fringe but within the tight sentences there is a clarity that delights while maintaining purpose. 

Enjoy the opening sequences.  Let them stroke the nostalgic pleasure centers of your brain.  Those beats clearly have the feeling of classic teen horror movies.  Everything is tranquil and optimistic, but just slightly too bright and idyllic.  If Lunatic Fringe were a film, this entire opening sequence would occur with minimal soundtrack - a helicopter shot of the truck driving the forested highway, and then the score would build as we are treated to blocky white credits- ending in an ominous crescendo as Lexie sees her new college for the first time.  Soak in the atmosphere and tone.  Think Final Destination, Halloween, Carrie.  It all looks swell, but something dark is lurking at the fringes.

Moon is taking readers on a journey of self-discovery, sexual awakening, and personal growth.  She is also lampooning some pretty specific “types” within and without the gay community, but she is doing so with a straight face and a loving acknowledgement.  Best of all, Lunatic Fringe is a high wire act of social commentary and ridiculousness.  Moon has decided our werewolf lore isn’t getting the love and examination it deserves so she is out to set the record straight.  Or gay.  Slanted, maybe? 

Whether werewolves serve as the stinking, snarling nightmare fuel of your fevered dreams; or they are the furry, misunderstood cuddle bunnies of your fantasy romance – Moon is going to change how you think about them, about yourself, about women, and about sexual politics.  Or maybe she is just joshing ya’ and this is all a terrific lark with a clever premise and a lot of sex.  Either way, it is worth a download.

Favorite Lines:  You have to love an author who writes about werewolves and uses the word insouciance.  It’s that kind of book.  And I like it.  How about this one:

Her skin was the color of incense and rolled like smoke over her ample figure.

Or this:

Natalee had gotten out of the natural tub and stood in the moonlight, ineffable wings of steam rising from her body like her soul ascending. Her skin was as white as the moon, a cold angel.

Who ever said werewolves can’t be sexy?  Pshaw.

Issues or Satire?  The hectoring, smug tone of some of the women (or should I more PC’edly say womyn?) gets wearisome in spots.  In fact, it becomes distractingly over-the-top.  In the beginning, Lexie is forever being lectured by Blythe and the rest of the Pack on all things feminist.  Don’t get me wrong, it works for the characters as they are uber ramped-up college aged radicalized feminists who, naturally, have all the answers.  I mean, didn’t everybody when they were in college?  But having no valid counterpoint to Blythe’s diatribes seemed to lend them an endorsement by the author, which had the unfortunate side-effect of taking the reader out of the fantasy and focusing too heavily on the politics of the situation.  At least early on.  Moon created interesting dynamics between her characters but the intrigue of these scenes sometimes got lost in political rally cries.  To add salt to that wound, our protagonist (Lexie) is chronically inundated with moronic id monsters masquerading as frat boys.  In truth, it felt heavy-handed and scraped painfully against the subtlety and symbolism of the rest of the work. 

(While appreciating much of the Pack’s ideology – I did find myself wanting to point out some of the gross assumptions and logical fallacies in it’s arguments.  Then again, I’m a nerd.  And nerds think we know everything, too.) 

Intentional or not, I found the Pack to be mostly ridiculous in their self-seriousness and yet they still completely worked within the narrative.  Lexie started off without any agency and proved a frustrating counter to the debate of male/female dominance and control – given that she was willing to flip flop between two powerful forces that were forever telling her what to do and who to be – as long as it was within their image of femaleness.  And there were the guys.  Even I began to feel a little brow-beaten by the man-as-perennial-bad-guy themes, but dressing it up in fur and going to such hyperbolic lengths to make the point, made these stand-by arguments fun and fresh.

Hang in there, even if the polarizing arguments feel wearying… our protagonist’s name is Lexie Clarion for goodness sake.  And she does eventually find herself and begins to act as a gentling, clarifying voice for the lunatic fringes surrounding the novel’s core issues.  It just takes her a while to get there.

The Sex: Good lord is there sex!  It takes a while to happen, but once it does, Moon turns her ample talents to the task of giving us some legit cliterary wonder with Lunatic Fringe.  Then she snuffles and pads around the territory of wolf-human lovin’.  Fortunately, she doesn’t actually go there, but having Lexie marvel at the musculature and muskiness of her animal-form lover was plenty for The Worm to feel naughty about without having to seek professional or legal help.

The Straight Truth: This book will appeal to some lesbians and most feminists for sure.  If I’m being honest (when is The Worm not?) I do not see it being a pleasant read for mainstreamers.  The problem isn’t in Moon exploring equality of the sexes, or even that she has her characters take such strident positions… it is, frankly, how committed Moon is to her satirical look at the ideology.  In pushing the werewolf as female metaphor, she has thrust it into every conceivable aspect of her story.  The Worm surely gets it.  Much has been made of vampirism as metaphor for sexual dominance.  I mean, who doesn’t intuitively understand the impaling, seductive, quasi-rapey nature of vampirism as metaphor to male sexual aggression and manipulation?  But in doing the same for werewolves as symbols of a reclaimed femaleness, Moon has decided to abandon some of the more subtle suggestions and go right for the blunt cudgel of graphic biology.  Of course, I am talking about the monthly moon change as it relates to menses.  Yup.  And it isn’t cute or “told slant.”  You will be treated to tampons and finger checks and all sorts of real, graphic, plain speak that might feel out of place tonally for such an otherwise sly work.

While reading some scenes in Lunatic Fringe, the reader may feel the author is intentionally challenging his or her notions about what is acceptable and what is not in our phalus-loving world.  As if Moon is just daring the reader (or reviewer) to criticize certain passages.  But the trap is too easily seen, and the arguments too predictably false.  If The Worm were to gripe about the abundance of bloody menses action in the book, it might mean The Worm is uncomfortable with femininity or ashamed of what bodies are meant to do naturally.  Bad Worm.  And yet, my criticism of this element is two-fold:  1) just because something happens naturally doesn’t mean it warrants use in the novel, and certainly doesn’t demand graphic explanation every time it is used.  I mean, where are the descriptions of feces and flatulence?  Those could be important plot points in a thriller so connected to scents and tracking. 2) Moon gracefully constructed the rest of the descriptions in her novel, why do these beats about menstruation and body hair read so, well, clunky?  I’m all for Moon making me see these aspects of femininity in an empowering way, but she’s got to work for it.  Having the nerve to pass them off as sexy or strong isn’t the same thing as making them so.  And given the rest of Moon’s skill on display, I think she could have pulled it off if she’d worked harder at it.

One last bit of straight truth for y’all; be prepared for quite a bit of slapdash moralizing.  Yes, some of it is character building.  Some of it is for ambiance.  Some of it is intentionally grandiose and goofy.  And some of it is sneaky snark slipped into what could ostensibly be read as politically centrist – but don’t be fooled.  Moon does draw some of her feminist characters archly over-the-top, but even her more moderate characters cram a few logical fallacies into their feminist platforms.  And don’t be shocked to learn that no “heterotypical” male character in this novel is going to be a rock solid good guy.  I’m just saying.  Take this bit as a taste of what there is to be found in Lunatic Fringe.  A wise, older woman is explaining to our protagonist how the Pack came to be:

Feminists like the Pack get a bad rap for hating men. But it’s a defense mechanism in response to the hatred men have for women. For every nice guy like your dad, there’s another man who turns his desire for women into contempt, or exaltation, which is just as dehumanizing.

Okay, keep in mind this is the more open-minded character speaking.  She is trying to mitigate the harsh feelings Lexie is having for the feminist group known as the Pack.  My problem is the false premise for the Pack’s defensiveness.  It boldly asserts, as fact, that men hate women.  Of course, given that premise, it is easy to see why they are so virulently anti-male, right?  But is that a fact?  Again, this is our wiser, more moderate character speaking.

And as an FYI, the protagonist’s father isn’t so much a “nice guy” as a spectacularly weak one.

Geek Out Moments:  Loved the naming of one of the Pack Corwin.  Maybe the author meant it, maybe she didn’t – I loved it anyhow.  In fact, many of the names in the novel feel like either one-the-nose character descriptions or nods to existing lore.  All good stuff.  (Having the tale set in the Pacific Northwest, with its Native American heritage, also helped keep the spot-on names believable to the characters and the reader alike.)

In an effort to mutate the werewolf lore in keeping with the “anti-vampire” theme, Moon even played with the key trans-formative action in all werewolf legends:  the bite.  I’ll try to avoid spoilers here, but one concept had me geeking so hard that I can’t help but give Moon props for it.  In vampire tales, our newbies are converted through a bite and exchange of fluids, yes?  And we can all sort of agree that the very penetrative nature of this action lends itself perfectly to the vampirism/male sexuality metaphor, yes?  Okay, let me say Moon does not use a bite as her catalyst for change into a werewolf.  There is a seemingly innocuous explanation for change given, and it involves lapping up water from a very specific location (get your minds out of the gutter).  That is all I can say without ruining some of the mystery in Lunatic Fringe, but the visual and the concept, and the active participation required in said ritual, works wonderfully in this story.  It is still vaguely ridiculous, but gets uber-points for creativity and metaphor continuity.

Favorite Scenes:  The entire dorm room disaster scene was fantastic.  Here, more than almost anywhere else, Moon demonstrates the “less is more” style of her writing.  Symbolically a lot is going on in this scene, but it also has plot significance, character introduction, and stunning visual/aural intensity.

The transformation scenes were handled very nicely.  Less ink was spent describing ghastly, painful external change than on the internal rearrangements and shift in sensory awareness.

Which brings us to the physicality in Lunatic Fringe.  Moon has a strong sense of the physics of movement and power in her werewolf characters, so the action beats are timed and delivered perfectly.  But more than this, the author also seems to understand the nature of her creatures (whether in human or wolf form) so well that she uses their innate physicality to communicate character, tension, and danger as well.  It gives the entire piece a different vibe than one would get from, say, an angsty internalized vampiric wank fest?

Final Thoughts: The above critiques aside, I had a blast with Lunatic Fringe.  I just do not think it is meant for, nor going to be enjoyed by, everybody.  That works for me.  (Have you seen our tagline?)  What’s more, I think the entire novel is to be read with a wink and a nod.  Moon has brilliantly tweaked the werewolf lore to fit lesbianism, college cliquiness, sexual awakening, and self-awareness themes.  But I think she has done it with a gleeful giggle.  There is just no way she did not intentionally make the whole thing damned funny and self-deprecating.  Don’t misunderstand… this is not a “funny book” in the sense that you have goofy, quippy characters running around.  It is written with a steady hand and sober tone.  However, from the title to the plot, to the themes within – Lunatic Fringe is self-referential and gently mocking.

The Worm gives a strong recommendation for Lunatic Fringe to any lesfic or feminist readers out there.  The rest of The Worm Army?  Hmmm.  Maybe pass on this one unless you are really ready for something completely different and likely to make you squirm a bit.  Hell, now that I think about it, that may apply to my feminist lesbian readers, too!  If you are already in the militant camp – enjoy!  If you aren’t, but just love your sexy werewolf lovin’, give this one a try.  Just don’t take it too seriously.  It’s okay to laugh and still be a feminist.  (And if this novel weren’t meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek, I’m convinced Allison Moon is a vawy scawy lady!)  I’ll let you know if that opinion changes once I’ve read the sequel, which is already downloaded and waiting.

Unrelated Rant for Podcast Listeners Only:  I need to thank the Cocktail Hour podcast for their April 25, 2013 interview with author Allison Moon.  In truth, I don’t remember what was said to attract me to this work but I’m sure it had something to do with the author’s disdain for things teen and vampiric. 

Ladies of the Cocktail Hour, a quick note: less podcast housekeeping and fawning, huh?  If you are not going to drive the interview, at least let the author speak uninterrupted.  It doesn’t all have to be self-satisfied laughs and cool disinterest.  You’ve got a damned good thing going and serve to introduce listeners to new authors and new concepts.  But do some homework or feign some interest in the subject matter and guest.  I love your platform and you have amazing access to authors – don’t squander it by turning every interview into a mumbled phone conversation that sounds like something I could overhear at the supermarket.  Get in there and mix it up, ladies!  Access is a huge advantage, and it is clear you have personal relationships with many of your guests… but your listeners don’t.  Stop shortchanging the discussion by glossing over in-depth discussions and information just because it is something y’all have discussed off air.  We tune in for the interview because we care about the work and the author, not to hear incomplete sentences and half-formed referrences to drinking games and shenanigans that only reinforce how “in” y’all are with the guest. 

In particular, the interview with Cari Hunter was wildly uncomfortable.  How do you fumble her introduction, even bragging that you didn’t prepare one… and then put her on the spot by asking her to do her own intro and book synopsis?  Then you spend the bulk of the interview knit-picking her British/American language differences?  And then jump to a juvenille game to determine which of her characters she would sleep with?  I couldn’t believe I was actually hearing that.  Levity is one thing, but these authors are not mega-stars whom we are all dying to see “uplugged.” For many of them this is an opportunity to get their works and their talents before a larger audience.

So, my advice for what it is worth… shape up, ladies.  You have a lock on the market for this niche audience.  Chances are you won’t have it for long, so step it up or you’re going to lose it.  Your guests may be your friends but they are also important voices in a fledgling, evolving art form.  Let them be heard or someone else is going to start asking the questions.

By the by, I am North Carolina born and Southern California-raised.  I have people in New England, the Midwest, and the deep South.  I am a pretty typical American with varied linguistic influences and traditions.  To the embarrassment of many, I say “reckon” all the time.  So cut Hunter a damn break, huh?

(I also still occasionally use the terms “britches,” “business,” and “nethers” in ways that make my girlfriend cringe.  I’m working on it, though, baby.)

Summerland finds a balance in Like Dark Minds

  By cmixgeek | April 27, 2013 - 2:27 pm | Crime Fiction, Gay & Lesbian Fiction
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So here’s what we get with Christy Summerland’s Like Dark Minds:  you have your FBI agent; your small town sheriff who isn’t really; your serial killer; your small town attitudes; your lesbionic romance; gunshots, stabbings, and explosions.  Sound good?  Sound contrived?  If you think so, you would be right on both counts.  Summerland’s novel starts off a little quirky and disjointed, even pushing The Worm’s limits of patience, but slowly builds into an effective action/crime thriller with enough gentle romance to keep things fun.  This book is a perfect example of why it sometimes pays to persevere.

Summerland starts her novel off in a twitchy, incomplete way.  There are plenty of questions posed and really no good answers given until a couple chapters in.  That can be a great beginning for a thriller, but the degree to which Summerland kept the reader in the dark about inconsequential things was annoying.  The entire first chapter details our protagonist (Kasey) going about her business and doing her “job” in Martin’s Bluff.  Problem?  I couldn’t for the life of me discern just what Kasey’s job was. Did she work for a cable company?  The Geek Squad?  A detective agency?  Is she the town psychic?  I’m not being sarcastic… each of these possibilities presented themselves and it became a little too deliberately confusing.  How old is Kasey?  That isn’t made clear until the third or so chapter and, thankfully, before the romance begins.  In a book already centered around genuine mysteries, these unnecessary omissions started to feel more like a game the author was playing with the reader than like an attempt at controlled, character-driven reveals.

Fortunately, Summerland decides to knock out the important details and allows the reader to get into the core mysteries of the novel after the first few chapters.  There are two central mysteries in Like Dark Minds and they are;  1) what the hell happened to Kasey and her family to make her the emotional wreck and town pariah she is; and 2) who is the serial killer and why does he have it in for Kasey?

Of course, being a semi-lesbomance novel, we get more than just a crime thriller and family drama.  There is the burgeoning romance between FBI agent Gina and our victim/heroine, Kasey.  But where this book really shines is in it’s commitment to the primary issues.  The romance is balanced and largely unobtrusive.  Summerland does not rely heavily on lesbian themes and trite plot points about acceptance.  She writes two strong women who are motivated and also happen to be falling in love.  You won’t scorch your eyeballs reading any smoking hot love scenes in Like Dark Minds.  But you will find yourself hoping the two characters work things out – after the primary conflicts are resolved.

The Good:  The extremely (and painfully) realistic circumstances of Kasey’s status and attitude toward life.  Summerland did not use any beat melodramatic reasons for her discontent.  There is something entirely personal and relatable to how Kasey developed into the character we meet in Like Dark Minds.

Shockingly, the cat character (Lunar) was entirely acceptable to The Worm.  He earned a chuckle or two.

Rangley was a refreshingly effective, fleshed-out male lead in a lesbian fiction thriller.

The Issues:  This is another one of those stories wherein the younger female lead is bratty and stubborn and difficult.  And for some reason the other female lead finds this irresistible.  I s’pose.  It does wear thin after reading a ton of lesfic, though.  A little give and take tension is fun, but it seems lately we (the collective lesbian literary community) has fallen into the cheat of bratty equalling adorable.  Summerland doesn’t hit the note as hard as some authors with similar characters, but hit it she does.  Kasey has issues that are genuinely interesting, but in spots her character reads like a toddler.  That would be alright if she were then treated like one, but instead every adult character puts up with it and even finds it endearing.  To a point.  But Summerland tactfully pulls Kasey back from the bratty abyss just in time and then treats the reader to some genuine motivation and evolution of the character.  Yeay, Summerland! 

Final Thoughts:  This book is fun, moves along nicely, and has decent action moments.  The Worm gets the sense that Summerland actually wanted to tell a story about more than just two female characters falling in love.  Whopping kudos for that.  There is not a lot in this short book that is unique or inventive but the action is solid and The Worm was caught up in the rush to the climax.  Like Dark Minds doesn’t work the gray matter into a lather and it won’t keep you up at night wondering about the fate of our heroines.  But it is a decent little morsel that can be shelved with other established lesfic works of similar tone and style.  It won’t change your life, break the bank (at $5 for Kindle or free on Prime), or rock your emotional foundation.  But sometimes a small bite of romantic crime drama with a lesbionic bent just hits the spot, ya’ know?  If you have torn through all your Ali Vali Devil novels and already read Lucifer Rising by Sharon Bowers, or even the Justice series by Radclyffe… this one will work nicely as a place holder until new novels by those authors are released.  The sex is far less graphic; the romance not as prominent; and the emotional make-up of characters a bit more nuanced than in those works.  Check it out if you dig those lesbocop romances.  If not – this tale isn’t going to bring you around on that particular sub-genre.  Worm Out!

Hunter changes course with Desolation Point

  By cmixgeek | April 18, 2013 - 3:30 pm | Gay & Lesbian Fiction, The Dark Place
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Desolation Point by Cari Hunter has The Worm convinced this author is a necessary voice in the chorus of lesbian fiction writers.  There is just something a little bit hard and uncompromising in her writing.  Her protagonists (in this novel and in her debut, Snowbound) endure physical hardships in an unflinching way as Hunter gleefully puts them through the wringer of abuse, exhaustion, and injury.  They are portrayed as neither cynical tough guys nor weepy victims.  The tone of Hunter’s writing may not be bitter but it is ruthless.  Not for a second does the infliction of such damage feel exploitative, but the author uses it in a unique way to build her characters in both novels.  That being said, what was refreshing and focused in Snowbound feels grim and disconnected in Desolation Point.  More on that later.

What Hunter does exceedingly well (specificity of language) elevated Snowbound but was used to minimal effect in Desolation Point.  Hunter soars when she includes quick-fire medical jargon to create tension and verisimilitude to her scenes.  Early in Desolation Point, Hunter uses two parallel tragedies to great effect.  Her medics and other first responders bark urgent, professional dialog to communicate the desperation of their scenes without slowing things down to explain every comment or order.  This is one of Hunter’s great skills.  Using such specificity, she allows the reader to sense the tension while still being able to focus on the lead characters’ predicaments.  It also gives the reader some credit that they can decipher what is happening through context.

Shortly after this brilliant start though, Hunter shifts the scene to a remote mountain range in the American Northwest and away from Hunter’s own geographic and cultural comfort zone.  Mad props go to the author for stretching herself.  The only thing The Worm knew prior to reading this novel was that Hunter had some concerns about writing an American character and American dialog.  So when reading Desolation Point, I was perhaps overly aware of the few spots where this ‘translation’ felt wonky.  (Like Americans not knowing what Cadbury chocolate was.  What would Easter be without those delicious little overpriced eggs?)  These sorts of clunky bits were not too bad as they didn’t take away from the story and were even used to mildly satisfying, if predictable, character moments later.

What was a smidgen off-putting, to this American reader, was the heavyhanded way Hunter has her characters commenting on each other’s cultural differences.  If one character prefers to draw a bath, while another runs one - or one character has an arse and another an ass, it really didn’t require both commenting on the differences through valuable dialog.  British phrasing and American phrasing are different.  Some of the words are different but the vast majority of readers know those differences, enjoy them, and are at the very least smart enough to figure them out contextually.  Where Hunter trusts her readers to absorb the medical jargon, she gets nervous and slightly precious about the  British v. American speech.  Time and again (more frequently as the novel progresses) these quasi-jokes felt flat and wildly inappropriate given the dire circumstances Hunter put her protagonists in.

The Worm was an easy convert to Hunter’s style of writing and grown-up subject matter in Snowbound.  She created a crime story that had legs, and a romance that didn’t overshadow the adventure/thriller aspects of the novel.  In Desolation Point, it seems Hunter clung to the most uncomfortable aspects of her writing style (the in-your-face harshness and physical abuse) but skimped somewhat on the tight plotting that made the violence in Snowbound contextually palatable.  I like that Cari Hunter takes chances with her subject matter and tone – but after reading Desolation Point I fear that shocking violence against women has become the foundation for her writing, rather than an example of how far she is willing to go to create real characters.  Relentless abuse gets tiring and eventually feels, well, just mean.  Her guts to BE ruthless with characters is what has appeal – not the violence itself.  It would be nice to see Hunter use her bravery in other literary directions as well.

This armchair editor feels Desolation Point could have kept a tighter pace and allowed Hunter to do what she does best (vignette-styled emergency responder scenes) if one more perspective were included in the novel – that of a Search and Rescue chopper pilot or team leader.  Throughout the bulk of the novel, Hunter transitions between the Big Bad doing the chasing and Our Heroes doing the running.  I don’t know if Hunter really felt much like writing the Big Bad at all.  Every time the reader is taken to his camp, it feels one-note and not too terribly menacing.  Even as the role of baddie is played by increasingly nasty dudes, they are never particularly scary.  Sure, they do horrendous, torturous things to our two protagonists – but somehow the pain our leads feel doesn’t directly correlate to fear of the bad guys.  (Perhaps because everything in their world is out to kill them?)

Cuts between our predator and prey might have felt more tense and dramatic if there were also cutaways to a rescue party.  For one, it would have given us some of the exposition and description we needed for drama (storms, washed out trails, animals, lost signals, etc.) without it having to be so confined to just Alex/Sarah’s POV and a sprinkling of the bad guy thinking he’s just GOT to get that naughty girl.

When our protags see dark clouds coming, we are with them as they discuss what it could mean because there is no other logical way for Hunter to describe circumstances to the reader.  All the danger has to be set up for us through our heroines’ eyes.  But it becomes numbing to have them discuss their geography and weather conditions and THEN have to react to them.  Tension could have been much stronger if those conditions and plot twists could have been set up more dramatically by Search and Rescue personnel, freeing our protagonists to be already dealing with crisis when we return to them.  This additional POV would also have allowed Hunter to do what she is amazingly good at… quick, impactful technical information that lends drama and grounds the story in reality.  Play to your strengths, I say!  And really there is no better case to be made for this suggestion than a look back at Snowbound.  Hunter included scenes of search parties and police throughout that novel and it helped to keep everything in perspective.  It also let our characters be themselves in action, rather than forcing them to set the table for us over and over again.

While reading this review, it may come off as if Desolation Point was a disappointing read.  It wasn’t.  But it is a disappointing Cari Hunter read.  It seems as if she has abandoned much of what set her apart and then chose to write something more in line with what readers of lesbian fiction have come to expect.  Desolation Point felt like it was written by the real Cari Hunter only in the initial chapters and in a few bright spots toward the end.  I’m hoping and praying that this is simply a result of the author wanting to incorporate an American character so badly that she ended up writing a typical American lesbian adventure story.  I already have The Target, by Gerri Hill and countless K.G. MacGregor and Georgia Beers novels on my bookshelf.  When I grab for work by one of my favorite British authors I am hoping for more than arses over asses.  I’m counting on the work to have a different style, tone and direction than what I have been reading for the last fifteen years or so in American fiction.

Put simply, Desolation Point (and Cari Hunter) are fearless enough to beat the living shit out of the characters… repeatedly.  I need Hunter to be fearless enough to also give us a novel that doesn’t pander to expectations of an audience that wants everything made better by a couple Tylenol and easy resolution.  Had this book been Snowbound, I feel like it would have ended with the Kip scene near the end.  (Avoiding spoilers.)  Hunter has shown she can write adult women well – I can’t fathom why these characters were written so shallowly or why Hunter needed to include the formulaic set ups and hammy resolutions in the last chapters.  The whopping majority of ink in Desolation Point goes to violence and pain – psychic or physical.  Very little goes into telling the reader what in Holy Hell these two women find so appealing in each other.  Yeah, they go through some intense shit together.  But unlike the characters in Snowbound, these women never seem to use those circumstances to demonstrate any distinct personality or source for their love.  Both are uber heroic and sensitive – largely because the environment calls for it.  I guess that’s it?  I mean, yes, they both went through some deeply traumatic stuff in their prior lives, but if Hunter wanted to do an exploration of how those tragedies could have worked on the psyches of these two women who then fell in love with each other, she didn’t need a lunatic, a prison break, and a monster storm to explore it.

Lesbomance Checklist:  Okay, kiddies… just for fun, here’s the rundown:  We have a dog named Kip who doesn’t really need to be here; we have an androgynous name (Alex); we have natural disaster cutting our heroines off and allowing them to fall in love; we have independent wealth (or at least the suggestion of it) several times over; we have a hint of elbow-throwing and juvenile gamboling to communicate affection between women.

What we also have is an accurate and believable depiction of women who actually work and seem to know what they are doing; and we have a male character in Walt that is NOT trying to change, admonish, or harass our heroine.

Great Moments:  The dialog between Walt and Alex was extremely natural and endearing without being saccharine.

It was also nice to see a different kind of bad guy for lesbian fiction (it is usually the religeous fanatic or serial rapist).

The way both leads recovered from and moved beyond their initial tragedies to get on with life was appreciated.  Hunter wrote these scenes very matter-of-factly, which created sort of an early respect and affinity toward both women.  There was an implied courage and strength that didn’t depend on spelling it out for the reader – what wasn’t written was far more telling that what could have been.  These are the moments where Hunter’s scene choices separate her from the pack.

Thin Spots:  The bad guy was a nice idea, but then Hunter did little with it.  She did not seem to have much grasp of the types of people who live in our bad guy’s world – and to anyone with any workplace or personal experience with this type of group – the character felt like a cheat.  Like a “monster-of-the-week” choice without much spine or grit.  It seemed he was chosen at random, merely to fill a necessary role in this tale.  Hunter’s ear for dialog, combined with the way she writes when she is in her comfort zone, could have made our Big Bad truly frightening.  Maybe more research into the bad guy until she was comfortable with him?  Or chosing something she already knows about?  Putting a sheet over a guy’s head and asking him to wave his arms around does not automatically make him scary.  So little effort can result in a character more akin to Casper than a Klansman.

Final Thoughts:  Hunter’s style remains her own and is a critical part of the emerging mosaic of renewed lesbian fiction.  Take heart, Worm Army… Cari Hunter can be found  in Desolation Point.  You will just have to look harder for her amidst the more familiar set pieces of past lesbian fiction.   If Hunter returns to the aspects of her writing that make her stand out from the herd, she has the potential to be a fantastic contributor to the evolving world of contemporary fiction.

I’m feeling optimistic today, so I will probably sign-on for the sequel to Desolation Point.  I am just fervently hoping the real – and fully realized – Cari Hunter writes it.  I pick up her books for a British author’s take, even if the characters and settings are American.  It is far too soon, in what I anticipate will be a long writing career, for Hunter be rejecting her own voice for pat, easily digested American formula.

Bisexuals are psychotic, too…

  By cmixgeek | March 20, 2013 - 2:23 pm | Gay & Lesbian Fiction
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This lesbomance novel was brought to The Worm’s attention via an emailed review request and, at $6.99 for the Kindle version, I was expecting something polished and professional.  While there were no obvious typos or formatting problems it had moments of laziness, inconsistent characterizations, and was thinly plotted.  It also tanked so hard on the lesbomance checklist from our Lesbians Want More  posting that I had to laugh aloud at its nearly perfect match.  All that being realized within the first tenth of the novel, The Worm was on a mission to find something redemptive in Tell Me.  Not because I owed that to anybody and not to assuage my guilt at blowing the seven bucks, but because without a specific mission I don’t think I could have finished this book.  It turns out that it does get better, but not until the final quarter or so.  At 400 pages that is quite an investment of time before any kind of emotional payout, but it is there if you have the fortitude to stick it out. 

Synopsis:  1998:  Meagan breaks up with boyfriend.  Meagan meets Amber and falls for her.  They start to have problems.  Things get worse, much worse, before they get any better. 

The Checklist of Don’ts:  Within the first few pages we got not one but TWO independently wealthy characters; mention of a pet pig named Bacon; and two artistic types (a poet and a musician).  We are also treated to babyish behavior and inadequate apologies when characters are vicious to each other.  Then there was the author’s insistence that eyes are never green… only ‘emerald.’  This may not be as egregious as “honey blond” or “raven haired” but it is freaking close.  We are also treated to various other tropes of the genre/lifestyle: yoga, aromatherapy, coffeehouses, and Birkenstocks (I didn’t make that up). And we are still less than one tenth through this work.  Good grief.

Characterization:  Erratic.  Meagan is strong and responsible because the author tells us so… just random little inserts that bear no resemblance to the character’s actual attitudes, statements, and behaviors.  Meagan is a power executive in Gucci who melts into frustrated jello when conflict arises in any area of her personal life.  She resorts to hackneyed physical buffoonery at the merest whiff discomfort.  Tell Me is the literary equivalent of the Keystone Kops meets Wall Street.  Not a mash-up that works very well in the book or in life.

Even during the “young love” period of this book, when Meagan is luxuriating in her new romance, there are jarring and wickedly mean-spirited reversals.  One comes at location 1442 and was crude enough to nearly put me off the book entirely.  An unequivocally horrible person has called Meagan a dyke.  As it sinks in that she is gay, Meagan’s internal monologue actually reads, in part, as follows:

Nothing about the image in the glass had changed but I knew, without a doubt, that I was not the same person.  Amber had come along and she’d screwed with who I was.  She’d changed my most basic nature.

Wow.  Nice way to view your new found love, huh?  Over the most basic and juvenile of comments.  But here’s the rub… the fact that she so quickly blames Amber (if only in her head) is NOT what the scene is about.  Ever.  Often Meagan just says and does these deeply twisted things without it being germane to the romantic narrative.  She kind of gets a pass that I find baffling.

Then, at location 2247, Meagan, Amber, and Jenna are at a small dinner party.  Somebody suggests a game of truth or dare, to which Meagan replies, “Don’t you think we’re a bit old for that?”  Yet a few lines later, Meagan has decided to drunk dial her mother:

Jenna knew that once a year I got drunk and called my mother to confess some outlandish thing about myself that usually turned out not to be true. It was immature but funny.

Is it?  Either way, Meagan calls to out herself as gay to her mother, which is supposed to carry the same comedic weight as previous years when she had called to say she had anal sex with her boss or that she enjoyed degradation fantasies and golden showers.  Hilarious – and mature.  And deeply sensitive since she is playing this joke in front of her girlfriend. 

Enough with Meagan.  My skull is going to explode.  I found her to be terribly mean to most people and morally blind – bordering on psychotic.

And now Amber.  Other than belonging more in the film Chasing Amy than in this novel, her character is at least consistent.  Consistently bland.  She reads as more of a stand-in for the part of ‘lesbian partner/mentor’ and serves the plot only to create friction for Meagan to rub up against.

And where did the peripheral characters in Tell Me come from?  Jiminy Christmas, they are some petulant, pouting, preening asshats.  It seems the author uses these characters only as gross caricatures of stereotype to inject anxiety and arguments into the plot.  Zeppo?  The only thing more ridiculous than his name is the way DiLorenzo writes him.  If for one second we were to take his friendship with Amber seriously, we would necessarily have to dislike Amber for having a person like that in her life and for subjecting Meagan to him.  The same holds for Large Marge from the bar.  If this woman isn’t a joke, I don’t know jokes.  She reeks of eighties low-brow comedy.  And who talks like that?  It seems as if Amber is forever dismissing the blatantly offensive, unfiltered comments made by her “friends” toward her soul mate.  I guess it’s Meagan’s problem if she can’t just go with the flow and allow herself to be ridiculed, objectified, and offended by these darkly cartoonish characters.

Then there is Meagan’s circle of cohorts.  Jenna is passable as a human and The Worm will let her slide.  There are far more horrendous characters to get to.  There is Danny (Danielle).  She is Meagan’s sister and exists to literally enter a scene, deliver her pat opening complaints about her mother, and provide Meagan with a chance to appear the mature and long-suffering sister.  Danny is pathetic, wholly out of touch with reality, and selfish.  She might as well exist in the novel with a callout floating above her head which reads, “Pathetic Family Member.”  Her entrances and contributions to the novel are random and pointless.

Now let’s talk about Basil, Meagan’s ex-boyfriend.  He makes a few appearances in Tell Me and those appearances do nothing to improve our opinion of Meagan.  He is disgusting and crass.  To have Meagan be even remotely interested in talking to him or considering sleeping with him again is just sad.  It reads like a weak attempt to ratchet up tension but  but instead it makes us think Meagan is pretty pathetic herself.  Either DiLorenzo couldn’t write Basil without the oversized Black Hat and enormous swinging dick, or she couldn’t see how his relationship with Meagan would color our opinion of our protagonist.  Even he gets a bizarre and undeserved make-over at some point.

Ken is yet another example of a character written for plot expediency.  His dramatic character changes are as unearned and unfounded as Basil’s.

And Meagan’s relatives at the bridal shower?  That whole family is just nasty. 

The Worm was sort of left wondering if DiLorenzo intentionally made all these other characters awful so that her vaguely sympathetic protagonists seemed more likeable and centered by comparison.  In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, right? 

Writing Style:  The actual writing in Tell Me is serviceable, if a tad lazy.  It is as if DiLorenzo had a storehouse of romantic cues and she was hell bent on using them all, regardless of the narrative.  I’ll try to confine my examples to earlier in the work, so as to avoid spoilers.  Take this one:  At location 519 Amber and Meagan share a first kiss and it tastes like cotton candy (‘cuz doesn’t every first girl-on-girl kiss taste like that?).  But Amber had just crushed out a cigarette.  I know this seems like nitpicking, but this is the type of literary license DiLorenzo takes throughout.  And it is just silly because it delineates so clearly the inconsistency between the plot and the flights of romanticized nonsense the author is determined to force into the prose.  There are countless examples of this woven all through Tell Me.  This was but the earliest and easiest example.

Another example of the author’s cheat?  Meagan has just viciously unloaded on a group of people at a bridal shower.  She goes outside and has a conversation with a male character.  Without the author ever really giving us any moments of sweetness or connection between Amber and Meagan (only fighting and sex)… a character conveniently observes:

“It’s the way you look at her,” he said. “Your eyes light up every time she passes and its written all over your face.”

That just isn’t good enough.  We only know there is this amazing love between the women because occasionally the author tells us so and then underscores it.  We, the readers, never see eyes lighting up or any behavior that would inspire it.  This is just more romantic shoe-horning here and it is totally out of place.

Generally speaking, Meagan does nothing to show any level of maturity or sophistication throughout the novel. In fact, she acts like a spastic twit much of the time but the author shoves expository passages at us that gloss through Meagan’s work day like she is a badass corporate executive.  At location 958, Meagan swings an investor to her cause by flattery and Marketing 101 basics.  But her co-workers praise her and there is enough metaphorical high-fiving that you would think she’d masterminded the Enron scandal.  But in another scene, she can’t form a complete sentence in response to a foppish artist who manhandles her and whines like a toddler during an art gallery showing.  Again, this is lazy.  You can’t have it both ways – writing her inner life like a teenager’s and then asking the reader to believe this young woman is jet setting around the world closing deals with millionaires who are carved up by her razor sharp mind and deft handling personalities – just because you write it doesn’t make it so.  I needed to see Meagan be strong and responsible in a realistic and CONSISTENT fashion.

And then there is the Basil storyline.  He is an unacceptable piece of scum and then, when it is convenient to the plot, he has a semi-transformation.  At location 5233 we need a lot of information exchanged and he is a logical choice, right?  Whatever.  To have a character be so disgusting and then so suddenly insightful and self-aware is ridiculous and a huge cop out.  Even his crude and racist comments are treated in a sweetly tolerant kind of way by our protagonist and, seemingly, by our author.  “Aw, that Basil.  What a scamp!” He even has a cute ass.  WTF?!  Until this point he had been nothing but a boorish creep.

Another word that comes to mind in thinking about the overall writing?  Misfire.  In terms of the romance, DiLorenzo repeatedly chooses the wrong moments to share with the readers.  She has a sincere desire to let us into the lives of these young women but something gets lost in translation.  Read location 1123, which depicts the two women checking into a hotel in France.  From the narrative tone one can surmise this is part of the “falling in love” montage.  Yet DiLorenzo strikes a sour note with this vignette.  Meagan is rude in the extreme and delights in it.  Amber thinks it is hysterically funny.  This is the weekend Meagan realizes her love for Amber, and it starts with juvenile rudeness that both women seem to find delightfully charming.  (Essentially, Meagan doesn’t like the hotel clerk’s attitude so she deliberately holds up a long line of other guests just to annoy this annonymous man.)  It isn’t that funny.  It is nothing a six-year -old hasn’t done to his mother before.  It surely doesn’t warrant paradigm-shifting views about love, and it makes our women seem like obnoxious twats.

Another wrong moment?  Read location 1605.  Amber and Meagan spend the better part of an evening pouting over some deeply hurt feelings.  There is a lot of passive-agressive needling.  In one spot Meagan summarizes:

Nothing could wipe the smirk off my face, not even Amber’s icy stare.  Outside Jenna’s apartment I was still grinning. 

You know what that was about?  Meagan wouldn’t introduce Amber to somebody as her girlfriend and Amber is hurt about it while Meagan is delighting in Amber’s pain.  She actually thinks she has won something by being hurtful to her partner and then refusing to acknowledge the hurt.  Gross.  At the very least unlikeable.  But to listen to the way DiLorenzo tells it she seems to read the whole scenario differently – like it is empowering or some sort of power play between the two women that will result in airing their differences.  The meanness and cruelty is swept aside and unacknowledged, like it is in most of the book.  They continuously rehash the substance of their arguments but nobody gets called out for being a plain old mean-spirited, selfish bitch.  Or, thanks to Jenna, when Meagan is called out fairly explicitly later in the book, it is giggled about and forgotten.  Psychotic water under the bridge, I guess.

When writing romantic fiction, an author has to pick and choose those character moments that will be emblematic of a whole – pinpoint that scenario, that look, or breath – that exquisite sliver of time that defines an emotion.   DiLorenzo seems to have been striving for this slideshow of relationship montage moments, but chose the wrong ones.  Even if Tell Me is based on genuine relationships or dearly held fantasies of romantic love – DiLorenzo did not chronicle it the way she thought she did.  She just chose the wrong beats to emphasize and her characters came off petty and mean.  Perhaps she did not intend this at all, and from my reading and interpretation of her work, I don’t think she did.  But she is expecting the reader to take too much on faith, while spotlighting only the hurtful or unsatisfying scenes of a couple’s life together.  I’m left feeling like the B-roll material may have held some of the better character moments – snapshots that captured the romantic essence of the relationship.  I’d rather have read those than suffer through the insufferable, only to be told in a couple lines of exposition that all I’d seen and heard myself was irrelevant because of some enduring mystical connection between the characters.  That is a cheat.

The Good Stuff:  The very last section of Tell Me goes off on a surprising narrative tangent.  Things get mystical fast.  While it initially seemed odd in a book of this type, it happened to work.  Typically I would have found the pedantic nature of it annoying, but by this point in the novel I needed something to hang my hat on.  Some sort of resolution was needed and DiLorenzo took this time to solidify Meagan’s perspective on her world and the people in it.  I’ll take that.

WTF Moments:  What would our review be without a couple of these?  Quick and dirty:  1) Grown women reverting to scathing fights in which the name-calling centers on being fat.  One person is actually called Shamu and another a fat Natalie Imbruglia.  2) We get more lesbian fist fighting. 3)  Meagan’s litany of con jobs and the half-assed personality rehabilitation that follows. 

Final Word:  Overall, I’m not sure DiLorenzo knows what she wanted to say with this novel, yet I feel certain she is trying to say something.  There is a rather long speech Meagan makes at location 1839 that seems to be the thrust of the piece.  If so, it is rather confusing and vaguely reductive for reasons that would require a dissertation to expound upon.  This internal conflict remains unresolved until the final pages of the book, and not every reader will be satisfied with where the author lands on the issue – but within the narrative, it worked fine for me.

Some readers may enjoy this book much more than I did.  Maybe some of the scenarios The Worm found troubling actually resonate with you.  Or perhaps you just have more forgiving tastes than I.  For my money there are better examples of lesbian fiction, and of relationships in crisis.  For a more nuanced portrayal of a difficult pairing, read Clare Ashton’s After Mrs. Hamilton.  For painful dysfunction, try T.A. Winters’ Awatangi.  The Worm would love to hear from you if you feel differently about this work.  Hit me up at cmixgeek@yahoo.com.  Out.

Lo sets a high-water mark for YA

  By cmixgeek | March 15, 2013 - 7:08 am | Gay & Lesbian Fiction, Sci Fi, Young Adults
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Malinda Lo continues to surprise.  Last year I read Huntress, which was a delicately nuanced portrayal of a fairy tale romance in an alternative world, and the impetus for me purchasing this novel.  Then I click open Adaptation and I have to keep reminding myself this is a Lo book.  This one is quick, where Huntress was languid.  This one is incredibly present, where Huntress was ethereal.  This one is action driven, where Huntress was internal and questioning.  The one similarity between Adaptation and Huntress?  Both are Young Adult reads (only in the strictest text-book definition) and both are written by a phenomenal talent.

To discuss what works in Adaptation, The Worm must point out what it doesn’t do.  It doesn’t condescend to the readership.  It doesn’t use a single unnecessary word, breath, or thought.  It doesn’t telegraph action or intention.  And it most definitely does not sacrifice plot on the alter of romantic contextualization.  This sci fi/conspiracy theory mystery is about just that – the mystery.  There are friendships and family relationships and romance for sure – our protagonist is a teenage girl for God’s sake.  But Reese is a person first and Lo does not have her meandering through the text pining and hand wringing to the exclusion of weightier issues in her life.

Now that we know what Adaptation is not, how about some examples of what Lo does remarkably well?  First off; she drops the reader directly into the plot and does so with such ease and skill that it took The Worm a moment to recognize what was so genius about it.  In the opening airport scenes, Lo is just specific enough in her vignette-like descriptions to allow the reader to fill in every airport experience they have ever had (or seen on film).  She does not describe each nook and cranny of the building - who needs that?  She does inject just enough for the reader to buy into the reality of the scene.  In particular, I am reminded of a a brief description of how the terminal windows become mirror-like as darkness falls, and this is but one of the carefully chosen visuals.  In a few condensed scenes, the reader gets all the information and specificity needed to fill in the rest.  Lo knows how to pick her moments and to choose her descriptions.  After all, the scene is not ABOUT an airport or ABOUT news reports.  It is about people and she keeps us with Reese throughout.  Does she need to ratchet up the dread as news reports filter in?  Describe the panic building amongst the passengers?  Not really, not in any earth-shaking way.  It is as if Lo knows we have all seen this type of tableau played out before and gives it to us in shorthand – so we can get on with our story.  The stage is set, and set well.

Now, I don’t want to give you the impression Lo’s work is thin or light on the immersion factor.  It isn’t.  But she either has a laser-sharp focus or some fantastic editors because Adaptation manages to infuse as much information as you need and then tricks your mind into filling in the rest.  I want to avoid any spoilers so I’ve chosen a scene from early in the novel to demonstrate this technique, but it is representative of the overall style.  Play along with me – it’ll be fun!  In this scene, Reese and company are careening down a desert highway at night.  They are panicked and lost.

The smoothness of the highway abruptly ended. The tires struck desert, and she felt the jarring impact right down into her bones. Loose rocks rumbled beneath the car; dust flew up into the high beams. The car had gone off the road, and now it was rolling downhill. Reese pumped frantically at the brakes, but it didn’t seem to make a difference.

Okay, short and to the point.  No ham-handed attempts at heightening the drama, right?  But close your eyes and think about the scene.  You can hear the grinding of the undercarriage and taste the desert dust easily – maybe even feel your own adreneline surging through your body.  But look back and you’ll find Lo never specifically describes sound or color or taste or a pounding heart in the scene at all, yet we’ve all had some sort of similar experience and our brains just fill it all in.  Nice. 

What else is refreshing about Adaptation?  How about an adult being able to write teenagers and have the gall, balls, and confidence to let them speak like humans?  Too often writers of Young Adult books create a slang-laden, pseudo-pop culture speak for their protagonist that reeks of gimmick.  (And of that parent who tries to hard to “connect” with the kids.)  Lo doesn’t succumb to this temptation.  She writes her teenagers like young humans, not like caricatures of youthful cool.  On a related note, Lo also handles technology deftly.  There is none of the self-conscious, clunky explanation of cell phone use, the Internet, and social media which is either over-used or over-explained in much of the other contemporary fiction about teenagers.  Yes, tech exists in Adaptation, but it is used as function and engine for the plot.  At the same time, Lo writes about these things in a way that feels natural.  Her characters are not defined by media and technology, it is just threaded through their lives.  (Best of all, Lo is familiar enough with tech and social media to create realistic dramatic scenes without having to lose a freaking cell phone every five minutes.  She also doesn’t get so enamoured with the possibilities of the digital world that she forgets about the human drama.)  In a long-winded way, I reckon what I’m saying is this:  I think Lo actually uses a smart phone and Facebook, rather than just marvelling at her nephew’s Vita and thinking it would be a “hip” thing to put in a book.

Next comes Lo’s handling of her cast of supporting characters.  For a relatively short book, with a conspiracy mystery at it’s heart, it was surprising to find so many prominent secondary characters.  More surprising still was that they all work and are all distinctly textured.  Every named character in this novel moves plot, has agency, and contributes to either Reese’s resolutions or her predicaments.  Like Lo’s handling of the prose – nothing is wasted on fluff.  On this topic, and without spoiling anything, The Worm must give props for the way Reese actually includes the periphery characters in the story.  None of that all-too-easy plot padding by having our protagonist keep every damn secret and detail to herself – just to heighten the drama and circumvent logic.  Mega-astro-props to Lo for having Reese share some things with her parents.  (This is only the second time The Worm has given Mega-astro-props to an author this year!)

Personal Geek Outs:  Sometimes an author inadvertently gives a reader a geek-out moment.  Adaptation had several such surprises that brought me on board right away.  For The Worm they were:  a Seattle mention, The Left Hand of Darkness, a district attorney character, and an opening  quote from the man himself, Charles Darwin!  I was geeking all over myself right from jump.

The line “Birds don’t destroy planes, people do,“ just makes me laugh every time I think of it.

I don’t know where Lo gets her cover art or how much say she has in it – but it has been remarkable on both Huntress and Adaptation. 

Nitpicking:  If I am going to be so totally won over by an author and/or story, I must challenge myself to find something less-than-perfect to discuss.  Scraping the sides of the bowl, I’ve come up with two comments.  One:  The love triangle has a strong Runaways vibe (the Whedon and Vaughan runs, at least) which isn’t a bad thing, just a familiar one.  Two:  The pace faltered a bit during the memorial service sequence.  At the same time, this felt calculated, so I don’t know that I can fault the use of the pause – maybe, in terms of technique, it just wasn’t as controlled as the rest of the novel.

Post-Read Wrap-Up:  I refuse to spoil such a delightful read, so these might be worth thinking about once you’ve already read Adaptation, and find yourself struggling to put your finger on why it was so different from the scores of other YA reads making the rounds right now:

The casual mention of PCS after the accident was a nice nod to keeping things current.  Also a great way to avoid the whole “you’re fine – nothing to see hear” BS we’ve all seen in too many novels of this type.  Handy dandy way to raise awareness; keep our characters real (seeing a doctor for goodness sake); and still leave it open-ended enough that our plot can move forward.  It’s a small thing, but those are the touches that make a good book great.

Reese’s mother has concerns about a new relationship and Lo avoids the obvious and groaner-trite scenario of hysterical non-acceptance.  BUT she also doesn’t leave it at a granola-crunching hug fest, either.  Love, love, love that Lo was able to show a parent being a parent (questions are asked) without being a stereotype of either kind.

While I’m addressing parents… the adults in Adaptation do not steal the scene or solve all the problems, but they are not irrelevant set decoration, either.  (Or, more typically in YA novels, foils for our kids.)  Reese’s mother, Mr. Chapman, doctors, and agents all have important parts to play in this story.  Lo writes them with as much truth as she does her three leads.

At the conclusion of Adaptation I wanted more.  Not necessarily a sequel, just… more.  I want a novel of Julian’s blog entries and Internet research.  I want the story told from, and expanded on, by Amber.  Hell, I’d be interested in re-reading the whole thing from the David’s perspective.  And that, when all is read and done, is what makes Adaptation so good.  You are going to want more.

Cosmo has nothing on Winters…

  By cmixgeek | February 25, 2013 - 11:26 am | Gay & Lesbian Fiction
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Awatangi by T. A. Winters is a lot more dense than I expected for the price point, and I don’t just mean the length.  This has the heft and gravity of a real novel.  I think I sang a few Hosannas in the first chapter alone. Winters chose to introduce us to two of the leads with a long, sweet, awkward-as-hell love scene in which the characters were realistically nervous and conflicted.  Not a shoulder-chuck, smoldering desire, or life-altering revelation during the whole session.  Can this be?  Is The Worm reading an actual novel?  About, you know - stuff?  Real stuff?  Could be, mon frere, could be.  T.A. Winters might be the real deal… let’s find out.

Awatangi is not a lesbian romance.  Or it is… sort of.  Depends on what you mean by that and The Worm is giddy that this novel does not fit into obvious genre-typing.  Was Revolutionary Road a romance flick? I don’t think so, and I don’t think this book really completely qualifies as a lesbomance novel.  It is, however, about relationships.  It is a painful deconstruction of one, for sure.  And, yet, it is deeply insightful as to the nuances and power struggles within a lesbian couple.  And that is what makes this book so frustrating and different.  The two protagonists, Jess and Kate, just cannot seem to get it together for long but Winters gives enough character development to make both women and their unique issues valid.  And that makes it all sort of beautifully tragic.  If you have had your fill of vapid goofball romance and contrived sexual scenarios from  this genre, Awatangi is a welcome departure.  And if you enjoy a slow burn sort of deconstruction (maybe enjoy is the wrong word?) this novel will give it to you in full measure – with a decidedly lesbian dynamic.

So… about that opening sex scene.  It was one of the most intensely non-sexy things I’ve ever read, but also sweet, naive and real.  I couldn’t help but laugh at how pathetically and realistically talkie the whole thing was; as complicated and unromantic a union as possible.  A perfect way to introduce the issues between these two women (Jess and Kate): What happens when romantic love rears its ugly head between two best friends?  And how much worse does it get when we throw good old sex into the mix?  Early on I was sensing this book, if handled in an adult manner, could be a new high watermark for lesbian fiction.  I would just have to wait to see if Winters could pull it off without resorting to cop outs and stereotypes.  Off to one hell of a good start, though!

The Good:  Winters isn’t concerned with dressing up the core relationships in Awatangi with shoot-outs, natural disasters, homophobic ex-husbands, or other stand-by dramatics.  (There is one car chase thrown in for what seems to be comedic purposes, but it literally goes nowhere.)  The author has the bravery to take on some seriously uncomfortable and painfully human interactions, without hiding.  I mean, Winters takes them on… like right up in the face.  For those expecting a typical vacation-spot lesbian romance, you are going to be disappointed.  Winters’ approach to this couple is almost clinical in it’s assessment of how off-kilter two people can make each other.  And he doesn’t do it with cartoonishly noble characters whose only difficulties result from sitcom misunderstandings.  Jess and Kate both have problems.  Not over-the-top silly issues and nothing wickedly unusual.  But Winters takes these women as they are found and plumbs their psyches deeply enough to bring out the core of where they are incompatible.  And he lets these characters stew in those juices for a good long while.  (Maybe a tad too long, as it gets painfully uncomfortable watching them slowly chip away at each other.)

Reactions?  Jess pissed me off – she was needy and selfishly pushed her romantic feelings onto her best friend, willfully jeopardizing a solid friendship for her own romantic satisfaction.  Then Kate goes and acts like a twit who’s primary reservation about their relationship seems to stem from her embarrassment at being looked at “that way.”  Oh, and she isn’t all THAT into it anyhow.  She really just seems to be rebounding in a big way onto her best friend and doing so out of some self-centered sense of ennui.  Add a dash of the female need not to disappoint, and things spiral downward from there.  The passive-aggressive barbs do not relent for one second in this oh-so-doomed but realistic relationship. 

So The Worm was a trifle annoyed with both leads… and that makes me over-the-moon freaking ecstatic!  These women came off real enough to irk me.  And they were human enough to show some spark of redemption or at least inspire some sympathy from the reader.  Woot woot for imperfect protagonists in a lesbian romance!  (Did I mention one of them smokes??)  Did I also just write “woot woot?”  Jesus.

Other than the unusual tack Winters takes with his relationships in Awatangi, there is one other thing that makes this novel feel so different from other offerings in this genre… pace.  Pace and literary style.  This book has the feel of (gasp) literature.  And that probably keeps it from being a one-size-fits all read.  But Winters takes his time getting us where we need to go.  There is a lot of nature in this novel (New Zealand coast).  Winters uses the natural surroundings to break pace, set tone, and create lush metaphor without being all bat shit blatant about it.  I’d say Awatangi has the thematic mash-up appeal of Jack London and Richard Yates.  I think I liked it, even if it sometimes felt the tiniest bit plodding.  I’m giving Winters the benefit of the doubt and assuming the repetition of scenes and all the conflict avoidance were deliberate pauses in the narrative.

The Issues:  I don’t know if I’ve ever expressed this particular feeling before, but Awatangi should probably have been a short story.  If it were, it would have blown the doors of anything else in a grown-up anthology about relationships.  Winters has some deep talent for sussing out the crux of a relationship and encapsulating it in a well-crafted scene.  Particularly with dialogue.  But I can’t help but feel the sentiments of this story belonged in a poem or short story, and since I NEVER read poetry if I can help it, I’d love to see what this tale could have been as a short story.  I have to be gut-honest here, by Chapter Nine I was kind of feeling done in by the bickering and the tug-o-war.  It was time to shit or get off the pot, people!  I was also starting to resent Winters just a bit for dragging me through even more of this clearly dysfunctional relationship… with no acceleration or movement toward resolution.

Thankfully, a few chapters later we get some new life in the story and things take a slight turn.  Jess finds some agency and begins the jagged process of making changes.  Of course there is a catalyst for this and it, in part, comes from another character (Keri).  But even with the introduction of a possible competing love interest, Winters never forgets this a story about a person (Jess) trying to find herself.  Not everything gets neatly tied up in a bow with the appearance of Keri.  The angels do not start to sing and life’s problems do not melt away.    Winters even has the balls to leave it sort of sloppy in the end.  The Worm’s opinion here, but despite Jess getting some resolution in her life, she is still kind of a mess who is likely projecting all sorts of unrealistic, self-destructive ideals onto the world and people around her.  Winters doesn’t make Jess “all better” in the final pages.  Jess is troubled and I’d be advocating she get some serious help if she were a friend of mine.  Winters keeps it real and avoids the usual pitfalls.

On the subject of pitfalls… let’s hit on the Keri character for a second.  (Actually, that sounds like an excellent idea in many, many ways.)  So, Keri.  The catalyst.  The mysterious stranger.  The embodiment of everything Kate is not.  Alright – I’m torn on Keri.  First, she is what I was hoping NOT to see in this book.  Kind of the magically perfect person who saves the day.  But don’t give up on Winters when Keri appears… not everything is as it seems.  I actually had no problems with Keri and, frankly, the plot needed her desperately by the time she appeared – maybe even a few arguments sooner.  If I have any real complaint it isn’t her “perfect fit” for Jess, it is just that Winters seemed to lose a little bit of confidence in the reader with Keri’s introduction.  (The real introduction… not the foreshadowy bits that came first.)  The author had pretty much just dished up Kate/Jess in all it’s unvarnished truth and trusted us to completely see where they were going and why.  But with Keri/Jess, some of the prose seemed too basic.  The flirting and the relationship-building were fantastic and welcome, but Winters went too far by telling us how perfect it was.  Trust me, after the train wreck of Kate/Jess… I didn’t need to be told how awesome Jess/Keri were.  I saw it for myself.  So, I can’t complain at all about characterization.   Winters nailed it with all three women.  I just didn’t need to have the prose explain it to me, as well.  Same with the nature metaphors.  I was really into the vibe of the piece and had already felt the weather/surfing metaphor working beautifully.  So I had a tiny twinge of sadness when, late in the book, it was sorta’ spelled out for us.  Like suddenly Winters was worried we weren’t getting it.

Favorite Line: Describing the color of the Awatangi’s waters, where Jess and Kate go to deal with things:  The Awatangi was small, narrow and deep, oddly coloured for a river on the coast, neither milky-grey and glacial nor forest tannin-brown. It was a clear blue-grey, like a mountain lake, the colour that children draw tears.

For The Record:  I do not know if  T.A. Winters is male or female, but for the sake of simplicity I decided to stick with a male pronoun, mostly because I had to pick one and it is shorter.  Also my gut tells me this could be so.  No great reason – just that we get characters who say “fuck you” to each other a little more often than most women I know.  That, and the author obviously has no deep lesbionic message to share – doesn’t seem to be pushing the concept of a wondrously idealized lesbian romance much – which I quite liked for its change of flavor.  And I reckon I’ve never heard a female writer refer to “boobs” in prose before.  Could just as easily be a New Zealander/American thing, though.  Either way, I’m sticking with male but assign no significance whatsoever to the gender of the author in this instance.  Great is great.  But nobody wants to read a review filled with he/she, right?

The Last Word:  Awatangi is not a good-time, poolside vacation book.  It is brooding, while occasionally flippant and funny.  If you find yourself invested in the protagonists right away, particularly Jess, then you are in for a completely satisfying examination of dysfunction as high art. This is the best of the books in this genre that I won’t ever read again.  It is poignant and necessarily tedious in spots, but very, very solid.  A great book with zero re-readability and I’m thinking that is the best compliment I can give a book of this type.  The author took me through every pang and doubt for nearly five hundred pages, and while it was richly told, there is just no way I’m going back for more.  This one will have you wrung out, strung out, and whipped for sure. 

Tell you what… forget those Cosmo compatibility quizzes.  I’d say if you really want to stir up that particular hornet’s nest in your relationship (don’t!)… screw the magazines and read this book with a partner.  Winters does such a spot-on recreation of relationship dysfunction, while still making both characters substantial and sympathetic, that it might make for an interesting conversation starter.  Jess ain’t no shiny superhero (she’s maddeningly imperfect, immature, and directionless at times) and Kate is no scheming bitch (she is pretty up-front about what she wants).  But man alive – there is a whole lot of grey between these two women in nearly every interaction they share.  Not a grey area I’d advise any happy couples to tread into… but if you are masochistically inclined… read this with a friend.  Might give you food for thought.  Potentially food for argument.  At the very least it may convince you of how stupid some of your own fights would sound to an outsider!

This could be the year, Worm Army.  Already, with The Following Sea and Awatangi and After Mrs. Hamilton we are getting some lesbian fiction that is pushing the definition and direction of the genre.  The experiments don’t always work out perfectly, but thank all that is beneficent that a small cadre of talented authors are out there giving it a shot.  Worm Out!

Gambolling lesbian shenanigans… now with more prostitutes!

  By cmixgeek | February 18, 2013 - 4:10 pm | Gay & Lesbian Fiction
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Disclaimer time!  This book had two horribly unfair factors working against it when The Worm clicked onto it from the trusty Kindle library.  First:  I am still smarting over my devastating disappointment regarding Justin Cronin’s The Twelve and this was the next book I read.  Some things will just take time to get over.  Second:  After Mrs. Hamilton by Clare Ashton, another entry in our lesbian fiction category, had flashes of insight and beauty while still dealing with an unsavory issue like prostitution.  This book also deals with prostitution and let’s just say it is… um, handled differently?

Inamorata by Kate Sweeney is a cartoonish, train-wreck of a spoof on lesbianism, familial relationships, poverty, gender roles, ethnicity, and the environment.  And I don’t think it meant to be.

Our protagonist and her brother are introduced as sexy (of course) world-travelling siblings who tear through life like hormonal twelve-year olds.  There is enough shoulder-chucking, hair tousling hijinks for any JuCo kegger.  They grin and giggle and blush and swagger and wink and preen and screw and… oh, wait.  I forgot to point out they are both late-twenties college graduates contracted to build a clinic for the underprivileged in Panama.  Yeah.  We had to give them those ridiculous bona fides right away so it’s okay when they share prostitutes and get hammered on tequila before meetings and do things so stupid no self-respecting jackass would ever cop to them.

But author Sweeney seems to think this is all great fun.  There is actually a scene in which our heroine (Mick) has to ‘fess up and explain to her BUSINESS PARTNERS why she has a black eye and how it resulted from being punched after trying to pick up a Panamanian hooker.  The author actually describes face scrubbing, stifled laughs, and the image of steam coming out of the business partner’s ears.  I’m not playing, here.  That’s the scene as it stands.  Just more of those adorable shenanigans by our goofball (but irresistibly sexy) lesbian.

So let’s see what is so adorable, shall we?  C’mon, it’ll be fun.  Is it the fact that this college educated Irish-American architect (Mick) is about to spend at least a year in a foreign country doesn’t bother to learn any of the language (who doesn’t know what a puta is?) but does throw in… and I’m NOT kidding here… an “Ay. Yi. Yi.” when something doesn’t go well.  For reals.

Or, I know, it is having emotional outbursts in a place of business in which she declares her attraction for a woman she just met?  No, no… I know what is cute as a button!  That she knew how incredibly discrete she needed to be in a Latin country (the whole lesbionic thing) and then gets tanked and hits on every prostitute in the city?  Not that this behavior leads to potentially life-threatening consequences for everybody she knows or anything.

How ’bout this… she condescendingly takes it upon herself to make a child day-laborer go to school if he wants to work for money to support his ailing grandmother.  Just fuzzy-bunny cute, huh?  Especially considering this warm-hearted American will be gone in a year and this kid will still have to deal with the economic realities of his life then.  As long as she gets to feel self-righteous for a bit.

Wait, wait!  The cutest is when her brother is stunned – stunned I say! – that Mick is going to do anything a “woman” tells her to do.  Adorable.  I wish I had a Mick-type figure in my life, don’t you?  All that macho posturing and tough guy stoicism (when she isn’t linking arms with her brother and skipping down the hallway after they emerge from their nighttime rendezvous in the same hotel).

But what of the other?  You can’t have a lesbomance without at least one other lesbian.  I won’t shred her because she is really just an idealized object of affection in this tale.  I mean, she has her profession and her motivation, but honestly she is just too stupid and naive to bother with.  I didn’t really buy any aspect of her as a real person.  Sort of another amalgamation of stereotypes and weaknesses – but with the appropriately fierce Latina protectiveness thrown in when appropriate.

The Writing:  It is simplistic and has a herky-jerky eighth-grader feel.  The Worm took a quick glance at Ms. Sweeney’s body of work and it is impressive.  She is certainly prolific.  But if this is a good sampling of her writing, I would have to conclude she is a student of the “quantity over quality” school.  This entire book feels like a rushed first draft of an idea that probably had no legs no matter how it could be reworked.

The Sex:  Alright, my happy horde of horny lesbos… I know, I know.  Not everything has to be Affinity or The Price of Salt or even Snowbound.  There should be no shame in just wanting to read something light and steamy.  This just doesn’t fit the bill, ladies.  I’m going to stand up and admit it out loud… I skimmed the sex in the earliest scenes.  ”What?” you ask in shocked outrage.  Yeah.  I didn’t skip all of it but, frankly, I didn’t give two shits about most of the characters and felt mildly repulsed at having to watch/read/experience them getting it on.  Sex is beautiful and all that… but is it?  Really?  Always?  This felt more like watching a creepy old neighbor diddling himself.  That’s how excited and/or invested I was in the sex between Mick and Rita.

But then… the middle section of the book actually gets a little more interesting on the purely lesbomance level.  I’ll admit Sweeney has a touch for the flirtation and ratcheting up the romance.  Sure, the scenarios are contrived as hell, but I’m not gonna’ freak about that too much.  It is a romance novel, right?  So points in the win column to Sweeney for the building of the Isabel/Mick relationship.  She isn’t breaking new ground but she is covering the familiar with a sure footing.

WTF Moment:  This is one of those legendary head-scratcher scenes.  In fact, it is already a nominee for next year’s Worm-Turner awards.  Let me set the stage:  Mick approached her business partner’s cousin and thought she was a prostitute.  Later, when all parties run into each other and the business partner finds out, he starts yelling in Spanish.  He is not pleased.  He cannot believe Mick thought his cousin was a “puta.”  Mick asks for a translation and is told that means a whore.  She immediately (LITERALLY immediately) screams, “Don’t call your cousin a whore!”  And gets all indignant and defensive about what a beautiful woman said cousin is, etc.  It is a very impassioned defense.  But let’s recap for a moment… 1) Is thinking somebody IS a whore somehow better than using the word in defense of said whore? 2) Is everybody pretty much okay with Mick being the type of person who regularly and explicitly propositions whores? 3) Why is the same woman she propositioned, who has yet to share a word with Mick, suddenly unquestionably NOT a whore? She is still just as beautiful, and that, apparently, is what lead Mick to think the woman was a whore in the first place?  I need an Imitrex and a Xanax stat.

Final Word:  Lest my review of Inamorata come off as an unfair reaction to other works… let’s be objective and compare it to our Lesbian Fiction Checklist written last year:

Sexually androgynous name?  Mick for Michaela.  Check.  Rough-housing to telegraph platonic camaraderie?  Oh, yeah.  No shortage of that between Mick and her brother.  Do we see emotional whiplash syndrome in evidence?  For sure.  See the above WTF moment.   We have a thunder storm to bring our lovers together and plenty of sanctimonious conversations about workers’ rights and the march of civilization destroying the environment (pretty standard obligatory stuff, and woefully out of place given the book’s tone).

On the plus side of our checklist tally – Sweeney does allow her characters to do their jobs, which is refreshing.  I actually began to dig Mick a little more when her reason for even being in Panama was developed and Sweeney allowed us to follow the construction progress.  Not so much with Isabella.  Yeah, she’s a doctor but she does no doctoring, other than to let people know they aren’t really hurt badly.  That, and naturally, it lets her take Mick’s shirt off to examine a minor injury.  Ho, hum.

But The Worm has a soft spot for any efforts to grow or at least not destroy this genre, so let’s play nice for a moment… In complete sincerity I did find the little kid Zeke (our protagonist charmingly bastardizes his ethnic name) to be interesting and hug-worthy.  Sweeney writes him better than most of her characters, but there is still something vaguely patronizing in the whole thing.  I mean, the author is so enamoured with adults “ruffling” his dark head that they even do it when he is wearing a baseball cap.  That is one strong need to ruffle.  So, is it sentimentally manipulative and over-the-top cute?  Yup.  But I’ll take what I can get.  Everybody else is a stereotype in the extreme (we aren’t even getting into the mustache-twirling baddie) so I’ll gladly glom onto the spunky ‘lil tike for my emotional center.

The plot is mildly interesting but tied up in the standard B.S. way.  The relationship is written with an above-average understanding of the lesbian fiction tropes.  But, really, I have to say I loved reading this book.  It is unquestionably ridiculous but I had one hell of a good time playing along and even snarking at it.  Let’s be real – there is plenty in this novel to be offended by.  But it doesn’t take itself seriously at all, so I just decided to goof on it rather than hate on it.  If you’ve ever listened to the How Did This Get Made podcast, or watched Mystery Science Theater, you know what I’m saying.  I can’t recommend this book to general audiences, but I absolutely do not regret the four dollars or so I spent on it.  I had a blast.

The Following Sea – Geonn Cannon

  By cmixgeek | February 8, 2013 - 6:46 am | Gay & Lesbian Fiction
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From the earliest moments of The Following Sea, readers will get the sense this lesbian romance was not written by a woman.  I’ll admit the name Geonn Cannon was a new one for me and I assigned no significance to it as I started reading, but sometimes you just know.  Then the “About the Author” blurb at the end of the book confirmed my suspicions.  But just what was so “male” about the work?  I think it was the effort that went into creating a three-dimensional, wholly likeable male character in the early chapters.  I think it was the  fascination with bed-hopping bisexuality and hints of an emotional menage a 3.  It could have also been the emphatically ’penetrative’ nature of the sex scenes.  Or just the lack of a troublesome emotional history/disapproving family in the plot.  Oh yeah, and there was the fist fighting, the beer drinking, the salmon fishing, the truck driving, and the airplane flying.  And not once is there a single moment of “oh my God, there are lesbians in our midst.”  Only an author who thought the whole situation was somewhat titillating and cool would completely omit this aspect of characters living in such rugged and potentially close-minded little fishing community. 

So what does all this mean?  Was it wrong for Geonn Cannon to pen a Sapphic tale without being a lesbian himself?  Should we raise the alarms and rally the troops?  Absolutely not.  Given that this work fits squarely in the lesbomance category and readers are not expecting a thriller or cop drama or even a natural disaster tale… The Following Sea is a damn solid romance novel.  Sort of The Notebook meets A Perfect Storm, produced by Vivid Entertainment.

The Following Sea is a quaint, small love story that takes place in a nowhere Alaskan fishing town.  I was stoking pretty hard on the setting (you know The Worm and anything oceanic!) and I was good and ready for a non-taxing lesbomance novel.  I’ve been deep into plots and schemes and breathless thrillers for a bit.  This was intended to be a comfortable little escape.

But what’s this?  One of our protagonists (Vanessa) is married.  And the hubby (Gus) is perfectly okay with his wife’s bisexual dalliances.  And here comes his best friend (Sara) who just happens to be a lesbian.  Keep that in mind… a LESBIAN.  And she feels an instant (of course) and overpowering (more of coursely) attraction to said wife of the best friend.  Yikes, right?  Potential to get un-PC and very icky ASAP.  But it doesn’t.

This is an incredibly well designed love story.  It has psychological depth without teetering toward overwrought emotions or easy answers.  (Mostly.)  What’s more, The Worm really dug the emphasis on the fishing town and the attention Cannon paid to the setting and the occupations of the characters.   He has a fantastic ear for patter and his flirtatious dialogue is some of the best I’ve read this year – he never seems to strain to make a line work.  Most of the character moments seem to move effortlessly between furthering the plot and fleshing out the motivations of his protagonists.  He also seems to put as much work into describing the process of commercial salmon fishing (cooler than it sounds, I promise) as he does into the process of painting and selling landscapes (not as cool, but does capture the artistic spirit).  There is as much loving care in his description of the male lead (Gus) as there is in that of the female leads (Sara and Vanessa).  Balance is what you will find in this novel.  There is a symmetry between the sex and the romance; between the friendships and the love interests; between action and angst.

I’m going to warn you, my friends… at about the 45% mark on the Kindle, I got worried for author Cannon.  He had moved the plot into a seriously precarious place and I figured he had only three ways to go with his narrative.  I was invested in all the characters by now.  I was angry at some, sad for others, and frustrated by them all.  And then he pushes the plot to a point where choosing what was behind door number 1 or 2 would outrage my moral sensibilities and totally piss me off.  (You do NOT want to see The Worm pissed.)  Or he could choose door number 3, which was the cop-out pussy way to resolve the plot.  I won’t tell you how the cat jumps because that would be a MASSIVE spoiler.  I will say only that the choice Cannon makes to extricate his characters from their troubles is a little obvious and may seem like something of a cheat – but Cannon pulls it off.  He is able to do this because he laid solid groundwork, used appropriate foreshadowing, and even allows for an extra emotional twist after the big plot shift unfolds.  That and the characters spend the next third of the book dealing with the repercussions.

The Checklist:  When looking over our Lesbians Want More checklist from earlier in the year, Cannon stacks up pretty well.  Nary a pet in sight.  No androgynous protagonist names.  No independent wealth.  No lip service job descriptions.  No token males. No emotional whiplash.  All in all, Cannon avoided all the most common pitfalls.  Wicked big props for that.

Huh?: So there were just a couple moments where The Worm got a bit twisted up.  One was trying to recreate a few of the physical manipulations in the book that just seemed, um, well… impossible unless you are an X-Man?  Or maybe Reed Richards?  I won’t get graphic, but there were a few descriptions of hands and the way they can bend that seemed anatomically intriguing at best – cripplingly traumatic at worst.  Another thing that had me a little bent?  Sometimes Vanessa seemed impervious to the Alaskan weather.  There were minor inconsistencies with the meteorological aspects of Shallow, Alaska that took me out of the novel a couple times.  Like freezing temps and sandals.  Or the always open windows coupled with snow on the ground.  In one scene, Vanessa has kicked off her shoes, raises a bottle to her lips and gives Sara a thrilling peek at her tanned belly.  All I could think was, shouldn’t she be freezing her ass off in the Alaskan winter in the back of a pick-up truck at night?  And when the hell does she tan in that weather?

Notes:  This book is good, and for the money and convenience it is phenomenal.  For $3 on Kindle I got  a lengthy, action-packed love story.  It went to unexpected places emotionally and geographically.  There were a couple of weird digital artifacts, with the accent marks coming out as some sort of Wing Ding scribble, but not too bad.  Definitely not enough of a hindrance to keep me from recommending this book to any fans of lesbomance novels.  Peace, Worm Out!

 

After Mrs. Hamilton – Clare Ashton

  By cmixgeek | January 30, 2013 - 7:57 am | Gay & Lesbian Fiction
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This  book recommendation comes from the author herself.  But you know The Worm, so I’m gonna’ give it to ya’ll straight…

After Mrs. Hamilton by Clare Ashton is NOT going to be for everybody.  Then again, have you seen the tag for guerillabookworm.com?  So… this one is lesbian fiction.  That excuses a pretty significant portion of our Worm Army.  Next, it portrays prostitution in a sympathetic light.  I think a couple more readers just dropped out.  And let’s not forget it also deals with infidelity, sexual taboos, and protagonists more than forty years old.  I’m pretty sure the lesbomance crew just jumped ship. 

But wait!  This book is good.  Yup.  It is.  And The Worm loves to give props to authors who push the boundaries.  How many times have I ranted about the cookie-cutter perfection and nobility of the characters in lesbian fiction?  How many times the racking torment of contrived love stories and simplistic, almost juvenile emotions?  After Mrs. Hamilton is like a palliative to crappy, formulaic lesbian fiction.  So put that in your pipe and smoke it!  (Seriously, give it a good toke.  Let it saturate for a bit.)  Speaking of smoking, did I mention the most difficult pill for many readers to swallow?  That’s right.  Our protagonists unapologetically smoke a few times.  So that does it for whatever brave potential readers remained from our dwindling pool.   And now we press on…

And we leave snarky quips behind.  This book is not goofy or exploitative.  It deserves a proper review and it is going to get one.

Clare Ashton has created some of the most realistic characters I’ve read in this genre in years.  She has also padded her work with some of the stereotypical and half-hearted go-to’s we’ve come to expect from the same.  The characters of Mrs. Hamilton and Clo are living beings who inhabit their world with presence and weight.  They are difficult and a little jagged, which makes them wonderful.  When Mrs. Hamilton contemplates her aging body, the author is not writing it as if to say, “this woman is unassuming and self-deprecating, but she is actually a knock-out who just doesn’t know it.”  Nope.  The way Ashton writes tells us that Mrs. Hamilton is probably very truthfully assessing herself, and we love her (the character) for it.  Some scenes in this novel have a very naked quality to them.  Not every woman is a stunningly perfect physical specimen, and many are flawed in ways that are not plot devices. 

That said, this is almost like two books in one.  The bits with Mrs. Hamilton are fantastic.  The stuff with Laura, well, less fantastic.  But I sort of get it.  It feels like an effort to appeal to a wider audience… having one mature, nuanced storyline; and having one that reads pretty much like what we’ve come to expect – that is to say, super emotional younger hotties who get it on.  Kind of a lot.  I would be okay with alternate points of view and even alternate tones in the same book – but the Laura stuff felt rushed and much less considered than the careful development that went into Mrs. Hamilton.

The essential plot is a semi-obvious, what with Laura’s family concerns and the age differences between characters.  And the love stories outside Clo and Mrs. Hamilton are handled in a  pretty run-of-the-mill way.  Even Clo, in her non-Hamilton relationships, succumbs to set piece sexual escapades.  But Ashton does show flashes of brilliance in the intuitive way she writes Mrs. Hamilton and Clo.

Much of After Mrs. Hamilton has a very ‘conect-the-dots’ feel to it.  We bounce from scene to scene with little connective tissue between.  While reading this novel, I caught glimpses of the author’s outstanding grasp of her own characters.  At times Ashton writes with a deft sense of subtlety and care.  It is almost as if the reader can detect exactly which scenes or characters the author most wanted to write.  Not had to – but really wanted to.  And then there are the other scenes which feel nearly contractual.  Those transcendent moments of truth, though, are pretty freaking amazing.  The rest is… well, serviceable? 

 Favorite Scenes:  My favorite comes early.  It is the scene where Mrs. Hamilton watches the blond woman in the plaza helping an elderly American couple find a pub.  It is described with such simple poignancy that it feels in no way like the usual contrived meeting of lovers.  And Mrs. Hamilton’s gratitude and emotion as she watches the scene says as much about her as the obvious kindness of the other woman.  Like all authors who write from a place of confidence… Ashton does not feel compelled to explain or even name the emotion Mrs. Hamilton is feeling here.  There is a trust built early in the novel.  Either the reader is there with the character or not.  If you can’t tap into the honesty of the character moments in this book, then it is probably not for you.  No harm, no foul.  Ashton has the confidence to write her characters’ truths and leave them vulnerable and exposed for the reader to sympathize with or not.  In this way, her writing contains some of what I loved best about Radigan by Louis L’Amour.  (Who’d believe a comparison between an American writer of classic westerns and a British (?) author of lesbian fiction?  But there it is.)

Also loved the scene in which Clo is remembering her affinity for an action figure doll.  It didn’t go for the obvious reasoning or the shallow role-identification bit.  Ashton captured the adventure of Clo’s young spirit in her reasons for wanting that doll.  After all, Major Lee went outside and got dirty!  He had fun!  Great stuff.

Stand-Out WTF Moment: This one is surely ‘WTF?!’ –  but not in the way I usually select these scenes.  Typically it would be a plot beat or revelation that had me laughing out loud or pissed off or just scratching my head.  The WTF scene in After Mrs. Hamilton is more of a stunned silence.  I said I like authors who take chances and Ashton does that in spades here.  In an effort to avoid spoilers I will say only that there is a violent fight scene and it shocked the hell out of The Worm.  Not the way it was written – but the fact that it was written at all.  And in a lesbian fiction novel of all places.  There is some boundary-pushing here, my friends.  I don’t know how I feel about it.  Or if it works for the characters.  I can’t quite get over the fact that it is there at all.  I mean, holy crap, Ashton… when you go for it, you go for it.

The Issues:  I can’t NOT nitpick if I think something is special.  After the very strong and empathetic writing while describing Mrs. Hamilton, I was little let down by Ashton’s depiction of  Laura and completely at a loss as to the non-existent characterizations of most of the other characters.  I was with Laura for a while, but by the time we got the bar scene where she meets Susan, I was feeling disconnected.  If you juxtapose the way author Ashton creates and defines Hamilton with the other women in the book, there is a striking difference in the treatments.  There is a grace to the way Ashton connects to Mrs. Hamilton that just isn’t there as strongly with Laura and the others.  There is a palpable reality and sensitivity to the relationship between the author and Mrs. Hamilton, but many of the other characters feel like cardboard cutouts and plot points.  (With the exception of Clo, who is wonderfully screwed up and likable.)  For example, there is the almost hacky bar scene in which Laura completely falls to pieces with a complete stranger.  A caring, sensitive, sexy stranger (of course).  Laura’s total lack of emotional control seems bizarre.  She is an adult woman who has, seemingly, been dealing with the issues involving her parents her whole life.  Why on this night, with this person, does she suddenly collapse? Because we need to see Susan’s softer side and get her in place for the plot that is to develop, naturally.  It just didn’t feel as genuine as much of what went before.  There are uncomfortable hints of lesbomance contrivance at work with Laura’s character that are lacking in Mrs. Hamilton’s storyline.  So After Mrs. Hamilton does make for a slightly schizophrenic read… but the Mrs. Hamilton/Clo stuff is worth the cover price alone.  Skim the other stuff if it grates on you.  You aren’t going to want to miss the rest, though.

The Worm did have some issues with the structure and mechanics of the prose in After Mrs. Hamilton.  Admittedly, writers of lesbian fiction have the difficult task of sentence, scene, and dialogue transitions that most fiction writers do not have to deal with.  It’s all chicks (well, mostly) all the time.  And you can only use proper names so much.  I get it.  When she gets to talking to her about her and then she interrupts… well, how freaking hard must that be?!  But this is why it is so important to reset during transitional moments in this type of novel.  (I realize that is more a broadcasting concept, but it applies.)  The plot developments were coming along pretty quickly by about the 25 percent mark on the Kindle… and I frankly wasn’t quite sure what Susan’s relationship to Clo even was anymore.  I am not sure at what point I finally realized who the hell Helen was.  Maybe not until the final revelations?  There are a lot of women introduced in this book and they are often introduced together, with no strong characterization of their own.  With other works this is okay because the reader knows right away they are merely playing the part of “chorus”to the main narrative.  But here, it is obvious that the links between all these woman are paramount to the action and development of plot.  Ashton seems to have written the movie she was seeing in her mind… and did one hell of a good job of that… but without the same visual and emotional cues an audience member would get in a theatre, the transitions just don’t work as well on the page.  Less isn’t always more and I could have done with a few more touchstones or moments of recalibration before the next barrage of conversation between characters I had only a tenuous hold on.  Oddly enough, if you can hang on through the character confusion until about the halfway mark, some of the characters get proper histories and introductions.  At least I felt things begin to clarify.  I just wish I understood who these people were when I was reading their interactions earlier in the book. 

I also wish Middle Heyford was a stronger presence for each of the characters throughout.  It would have made some of the revelations at the end of the book more believable if the township were more of a character.  Without the strong sense that these lives all germinated and were tied to this town in a meaningful way – the revelations at the end come off pretty damned convenient. 

Final nitpick? Laura needs to see an opthamologist.  Honestly.  Every thing, person, and entryway she looks at is blurred.  Or blurry.  I’m going to strike up my familiar refrain here… Editors get paid, right?!  I had to stop counting how many times Ashton described people as blurred figures in doorways.  Or how many times, upon waking, everything was blurry.  Get to Lenscrafters, folks!  Especially you, Laura.

Last Word:  It took me a while to put my finger on just what was so special about Ashton’s work in After Mrs. Hamilton.  I mean, the above comments may incline you to think I was displeased with the work, but that is not the case.  It does have the type of slap-dash frantic pacing issues and emotional whiplash syndrome of other lesbian fiction… but still.  There is just something, some talent or knack, that Ashton is tapping into here and I can’t shake this work off as unnecessary fluff.  Then it hit me while reminiscing on my favorite scenes… she does emotional foreplay the way most lesbian fiction writers have perfected physical foreplay.  You know how (if we’re being blunt) we all read most lesbian fiction because it is softcore porn with an afterthought of a plot?  Or at least, I should ammend, that is what we’ve come to expect from the genre.  But Ashton gives us several moments in this novel that spark that quickening, that breathless ‘gotcha’ kind of feeling… and it is an emotional one, rather than a sexual one.  Like when Mrs. Hamilton and Clo meet up for the first time.  I won’t ruin it, but Clo answers a question as she leaves Mrs. Hamilton that strikes such a bittersweet, heartbreakingly perfect note, you feel the loss yourself as the door closes behind her.  After I read that scene I had to pause and marvel at the set-up.  I realized I’d been thinking and wondering the same things Mrs. Hamilton was the whole time – only I didn’t know it until the question was asked.  That is no accident.  That is good writing… to keep the reader just one beat behind the protagonist so that catching up is satisfying and crushing at the same time.  Nicely played, Ms. Ashton. 

So that, in summation, is what is so refreshingly good about this entry in the lesbian fiction genre.  Ashton writes truthful characters into an interesting plot, using solid narrative skills to get the job done.  Doesn’t seem like a Herculean task  – but have you read most of what is out there?  Not to say Ashton is only good by comparison to inferior works.  She is definitely an author to watch, and she is raising the bar for the entire genre – even if she still falls back on some of the lesbionic tropes that have plagued us previously.  Despite that, Ashton has a voice of her own.  If she were to pare away the fluff and tighten up the character introductions… Ashton could be an author on fire!  Those complaints are easily remedied.  More important than those quibbles, Ashton has something many technically proficient writers don’t.  She has a feel for moments and her characters’ truths.

I’ve bemoaned the dearth of ‘Sarah Waters’ quality authors in lesbian fiction for quite some time.  I’ve not been shy about how far above the field Ms. Waters is.  And now?  I’m not ready to dethrone Ms. Waters just yet, but Ashton is worth watching.  She may not have caught the master… but the gap is shrinking, and if Ms. Ashton looks behind her I doubt she’ll many others in her wake.  The potential is there, if  Ashton could jettison the awkward introductions and shortcut characters, to focus more on the truths in her novel – the way she seemed to do while writing Mrs. Hamilton herself.  I think of the complexity of the characters in a book like Fingersmith, and while this is not that book at all, I feel like Ashton had it in her to explore more of what was there between Hamilton and Clo, if she didn’t need to complicate her plot the way she did.  Sometimes you can’t have it all… was Ashton going for a deep psychological exploration of this unusual relationship between Hamilton and Clo?  Or was she doing a family drama/thriller with stock characters wherein the plot was the key?  I think she wanted both, and either would have worked, but her talents were spread too thin to bring both off in one novel.  Regardless of which book Ashton set out to write, or how successfully she did it, no one can deny she has pushed the expectations and limitations on this normally dull genre.  Who doesn’t love a risk-taker?  And I don’t just mean with the sexual taboos.  Of course, there is sex, too.  Plenty of it, so let’s address it.

After Mrs. Hamilton is loaded with hot sex scenes.  Is that really a stretch in this genre?  Nope.  The sex is pretty much mandatory and handled adequately in this book.   Credit goes to Ashton in that at least three of the sex scenes are plot and/or character driven and the author infuses enough emotional resonance and consequence for it to have it’s place in the story.  That is one of my favorite things about this work.  Every character experiences consequences to their actions.  Sexual, or otherwise.   The bottom line on After Mrs. Hamilton?  You will come for the sex, but you’ll stay for the substance.  (And, yes, that was absolutely intended to be as dirty as it sounded.)  Worm Out!

The Girl Back Home – R.E. Bradshaw

  By cmixgeek | December 19, 2012 - 7:17 am | Gay & Lesbian Fiction
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This one reads like a very personal story and the emotions seem to well from a genuine place.  But this is a full-time; no fluff, pretense or subterfuge… Romance Novel.  It is about adult relationships and the complexities of ending them.  It is about worldly women in their early forties and it deals entirely with their emotional make-up and mistakes.  It is not a bad story and it does have the tactile feel of a tale told by a good friend – if, and only after, you’d asked for the story of how your favorite couple met.  In fact, that’s it exactly.  This book feels like a question answered.  So, if you are interested in how two fictional characters got their emotional lives in order – and do not expect or crave anything else – this book will nail it for you.

I give Bradshaw props for not even pretending to weave other plot points into this novel.  It is thoroughly about two couples (three, if you count the token straights) and how their lives are ripped apart and reformed.  But do not go into this book expecting anything inventive or inverted.  (Subtle use of an old school term there.  I do crack myself up.) 

The emotional stakes feel very high to the characters in the The Girl Back Home, but you might find yourself struggling to get very invested.  After all, we’ve all probably had relationships begin and end.  Super wrenching when its happening to you – maybe less so second hand.  If you feel an immediate tug toward one or more characters in this book, you may find this an honest and touching story.  If you need more steak with your sizzle, you will probably want to take a pass on this one.  The Worm was engaged enough to finish the story, but didn’t feel any satisfaction once it was done. 

The Good and The Issues:  Bradshaw got off to an interesting start with this book.  Our heroine is sort of a shit.  The Worm was thinking, alright! – this author is going to tackle people as they are, instead of ennobling them into unrecognizable archetypes.  I’ll buy into a character piece with flawed folks any day.  Sadly, said heroine makes the same kinds of mistakes throughout the story and it is only happenstance that makes it work out for her in the end.  Very little arc in her motivation or development.  Maybe there is one difference toward the end of her emotional journey – our heroine makes the same EXACT mistakes but for different reasons.  At the end of the novel she single-handedly starts screwing up her life for those maddenly ‘noble’ reasons that are just plot devices in disguise.  (Example:  I have had days to tell you the truth about something you should know… but now at the last moment I realize I have to tell you, but a text is just so impersonal that I’ll leave it unsaid until it is too late.)  Are you gnashing your teeth yet?  Just wait…

There were a few moments in The Girl Back Home in which I felt like the author either missed an opportunity, or wasn’t paying enough attention to character continuity.  One of the characters is a nationally recognized lecturer and professor dealing almost exclusively with battered women.  When this issue comes up in the actual romantic narrative of the story – this professor is oblivious and thrusts petty egotism ahead of her professional calling.  Maybe this was to make the character seem a hypocrite?  If so, it really wasn’t necessary to so clearly delineate who the “bad guys” had become in the novel.  In fact, the book might have been more interesting if there were no classic baddies at all.

Also, there is a WHOLE lot of attention paid to fabulous wealth and lives of near-leisure.  This is not strictly a Bradshaw problem, but one that has been harped on ad nauseum by The Worm in past writings about the state of lesbian fiction.  Jiminy Christmas, people, get over it already!  If you cannot write interesting characters and plots without dismissing reality completely (via the all-too-convient sweeping away of  the need to actually work for a living) then maybe its time to take another look at your manuscript.  Or check out Snowbound by Cari Hunter to see how it can be done.  It is not enough to describe the kick-ass attorney by the thousand dollar suit and great hair cut.  How about she actually acts like a kick-ass attorney rather than an oversexed id-monster who manages her romantic life with all the grace and maturity of a pre-teen?

WTF?!?! With Spoilers:   I was determined to see this book through to the end.  Ultimately, it works on some levels.  It does cover the familiar tropes of the lesbian romance, in that we have a sexual awakening; the “talk” with supportive and non-supportive family members; there are plenty of references to the way homophobes behave; the women are financially independent and successful; and of course there are plenty of angsty misunderstandings and earth-shaking love making.  But this novel also contained some the most memorable WTF moments in recent history.  Educated women who work in the legal system, for God’s sake, ignore stalking, physical abuse, and attempted murder.  Seriously.  I’d never make that up… it is in the book.  I’m going to spell this out very plainly.  Spoilers For Real Here!!***  A drunken husband throws a hate-inscribed brick through a window and leaves hand prints on his wife after he beats her.  Nobody calls the police because it might be embarrassing if people find out about the lesbians in their midst.  But they do decide to put in motion detector lights.  WTF number one.  And THEN the author wimps out in the big showdown with said drunken asshole.  It involves a gunshot, a concussion, attempted murder, and our two capable women being saved from their imminent demise AND FROM having to actually take action which may be unpalatable for some readers.  And it happens in a bewilderingly improbable way -all so our heroines don’t have to do anything unpleasant or so serious that our plot would actually have to accommodate the repercussions.  Oh, and it is the token straight guy who does the saving.  I’m at a complete loss.  All this hand-wringing and discussion about acceptance and strength and commitment to what is real.  And then we get a weaselly resolution to an genuinely thorny problem.  And the ONLY decent dude in the book seems to exist for the sole purpose of saving our kick-ass power lesbian from the surly and murderous husband.  Not only lesbians, but feminists of all ilks should be rending their clothing about now.

Final Thoughts:  I could have tapped out of The Girl Back Home with some sort of appreciation for a small, intimate story about the romantic entanglements of mature women… if not for the last quarter or so of the book.  Things just spiraled into a bizarre dimension where we got rehashing of previous contrived scenarios and totally irrational character motivations.  I don’t believe I’ve read anything else by R.E. Bradshaw so I’m not sure which author is the real one.  Is Bradshaw the sensitive and intuitive writer who gave us complex but real women in the first half of the book?  Or is Bradshaw the writer who turned a character piece into a hacky soap opera in the second half – where wine glasses are thrown at dinner and the oversue of miscommunication plot devices would shame even the cast of Three’s Company?

I just don’t know.  I need some Hugh Howey or Octavia Butler…stat!