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"Switch" by Carol Guess
Carol Guess's lyrical and accomplished second novel, set in small-town Indiana, is balanced on the tension between the surface cheeriness of the waitresses at the M&H Diner and their dark inner lives. Caddie and her friends each have a secret and, through years of hiding and watchfulness, they have developed a wary alertness to what other people are withholding. Since her lover Jo skipped town, no one escapes Caddie's attention or the brief focus of her shifting desire. She learns that shallow, selfish Gwen, the new girl at the diner, has a surprisingly rich singing voice, "as if all the things she knew she kept hidden in her throat," and that Selena, her long-time ally, cares little for people, but will kiss a $50 bill when she thinks no one is looking. Suffering makes Caddie compassionate, as well as needy, and she unhesitatingly adopts the small orange cat that shows up on her doorstep one rainy night. Here at last is something to love, someone to listen to her dangerous confidences. But why does the cat remind her of her lost lover? And where does the cat disappear to when the lover finally returns? "Switch" is a complex, haunting novel with mystical overtones and a mastery of narrative voice.
"Empty Without You" by Rodger Streitmatter
In June 1932, pioneering newswoman Lorena Hickok was assigned to FDR's presidential campaign by the Associated Press. To her surprise, she found Eleanor Roosevelt taking special notice of her. As their friendship grew, Hickok's devotion to the future first lady so overcame her scruples that she sent drafts of her articles to the head of Roosevelt's campaign for approval. After the election, the women began the passionate correspondence--cheerful and diary-like on Eleanor's side, and stormy on Lorena's--presented here. As suggestive as these letters seemed when they came to light in 1978, they don't demonstrate conclusively whether the women had a sexual affair, only that they became, for three or four years, each other's "dearest." They kissed and caressed each other and dreamt of a life together away from Washington. What is more significant is that these years marked Eleanor Roosevelt's transformation from a supportive wife to an independent political force, and the letters show Hickok's advice and encouragement to be essential to that transformation. Only with Hickok's support did the first lady gain confidence for her remarkable achievements in race relations and expanded roles for women. Good footnotes supplement the text, but the bland introductory notes can be skipped in favor of the women's story in their own words.
"Family Outing" by Chastity Bono with Billie Fitzpatrick
"Family Outing" is two books in one: a memoir of Chastity Bono's experience coming out as a lesbian to her famous parents and a look at the difficulties and triumphs that are part of every uncloseted homosexual's family life, with narratives drawn from interviews with members of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Sometimes the two projects work against each other, but for the most part, Bono is right in assuming that her story reflects something larger in the culture and that others' stories, in turn, bear on her own experience. Readers skimming for intimate details about the mother-daughter conflict between Cher and Chastity won't be disappointed by Bono's sensitively written account. For a long time, Cher overlooked the troubling evidence of her daughter's emerging sexual identity: "Instead, she focused on superficial issues that bothered her: my short hair, my mannish clothes, my weight." Their relationship deteriorated, and it was Sonny to whom Chastity eventually confided; ironically, the father who offered immediate, warm acceptance of his daughter's lesbianism would later sponsor the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act in the House of Representatives.
"Reel Time" by Julia Willis
Laney Turner can't say no to women. When her therapist, Roxanne, asks her out, she reluctantly agrees, and when Roxanne deserts her for another woman, Laney lets her strange new housemates send her on a series of disastrous blind dates--one of which ends abruptly when her date is led away in handcuffs by the police. But no one will introduce her to the woman she really wants to meet: the redheaded, dangerous-looking femme fatale who sings for the band Girl Group. Everyone, it seems, has a hidden past with lovely Ena. Will Laney get her girl? And if she does, will the mystery woman prove to be another disappointment? Julia Willis's comedy gets off to a slow start but picks up speed midway, when Laney and her flame-haired paramour begin to strike sparks off each other. "Reel Time" is a well-written first novel, with an unusually rich background of friends and events.
"Mono Lake" by Martha Clark Cummings http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/096462012X/ref=ad_lb1 The title story in this slim but impressive collection draws on the bleak existence of the inhabitants of Mono Lake, a small tourist town in the Eastern Sierra that shuts down every winter, allowing the residents, like beautiful Annie, to lapse into despair and drug addiction. What saves "Mono Lake" and the eight other stories here from descent into melodrama are their sharply observed details. When Annie tries to go on cleaning rooms at the motel on her first day without heroin, it's the smells--suddenly intense, moldy, slimy--that get her. And when Robin, returning home for Christmas in "Absence Makes the Heart," glances at the stockings laid out for Santa, she notices that her mother has carefully unstitched the name of her sister's ex-husband from his stocking and superimposed her new husband's name. Cummings offers a clear-eyed and generous picture of lesbian lives, and one only wishes the book were longer.
"Transliberation" by Leslie Feinberg
Although readers familiar with Feinberg's earlier books will not find much new material here, this collection of hir (this transgendered author's pronoun of choice) speeches, presented with a few essays by other transgendered writers, serves as a good introduction to Feinberg's ideas about the complexities of gender expression and to hir vision for a future "beyond pink or blue." As someone who faces oppression, incomprehension, and violence every day on the basis of hir appearance and the refusal to adhere to a rigid gender designation (Feinberg was once denied emergency medical treatment for endocarditis by a doctor who dismissed hir angrily as "a very troubled person"), Feinberg is in an excellent position to refute the shallow assumptions of the medical establishment and the mainstream media, as well as the more extreme views of the political and religious right. Most compelling are hir arguments on the importance of a broad-based multi-issue coalition among gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people, an alliance that could easily extend to other progressive groups. "Everyone who is under the gun of reaction and economic violence," s/he contends, "is a potential ally."
Stonne Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg This book is a poignant story of a life which comes full circle, culminating in the discovery of love and self-acceptance. The story chronicles the life of a butch lesbian, but its power is in expressing the anguish of being different. It is much larger than the characters and story, as all good literature is.
"Falling to Earth" by Elisabeth Brownrigg
Alice once dreamed of being an artist, but instead became a hard-working and successful manager at a computer-software company, supervising a group of over-educated writers who have decided, like her, to make money rather than do what they love. Her insistence on keeping her work life rigidly separate from her private life means that her private life barely exists. Lovers are sacrifice; needs are deferred. Her lesbian life, she thought, had a "Brigadoon-like quality, a fantasy world that was really nice to visit, but impossible to live in." Only the world of work was "real." What will happen when Alice's red-haired guardian angel, Phoebe, starts visiting her at work, spinning out tales that beg to be written down, and seducing the strait-laced Alice with thoughts of another world entirely? Elizabeth Brownrigg's first novel is absorbing and well-written, a series of stories within stories, reminiscent, at times, of early Jeanette Winterson.
All That Remains - Patricia Cornwell
Fresh from her triumphs in Postmortem (1990) and Body of Evidence (1991), Richmond chief medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta tries for the hat trick against a killer who attacks couples in cars--five couples so far, including Fred Cheney and Deborah Harvey, daughter of national drug-czar Pat Harvey. A handful of physical clues--a jack of hearts left at each crime scene, the removal of all the victims' shoes and socks, the similarity of the crimes to an isolated murder eight years ago--are all Kay has to work with as she goes up against not only the killer but also scruffy Det. Pete Marino, falling apart now that his wife's left him; her obsessive friend, reporter Abby Turnbull, who's signed a contract to write a book about the murders; the FBI, who are out to protect a killer they suspect is one of their own officers-in-training; and Mrs. Harvey, determined to punish her daughter's murderer herself. The medical detail--encompassing riddles of when and how as well as who--is as sharp and wide-ranging as ever; and although Cornwell takes a chance on a denouement that lacks the slam-bang impact of her earlier endings, she continues to show one of the most astonishing growth curves in the genre. Thanks to Cornwell's forensic expertise, her corpses continue to speak more eloquently than many crime writers' living characters.
All That Remains by Patricia Cornwll
Virginia Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta (Cruel and Unusual, 1993, etc.) has given up smoking and strayed far enough from her high-pressure office to act as a consulting profiler for the FBI, but her nerves are just as frayed at Quantico, especially since her rebellious niece Lucy is a computer-whiz trainee for the Engineering Research Facility down the hall. Scarpetta's latest case is ugly even by her standards: the North Carolina sex murder of Emily Steiner, 11, whose forensics are so contradictory that Scarpetta wants to exhume her for a second autopsy. Before she can do so, North Carolina Bureau investigator Max Ferguson, returning home from Quantico, dies, apparently of autoerotic asphyxia, and his local contact winds up in the hospital with a heart attack. Scarpetta scurries to work out how and why Temple Gault, an apparent serial killer who's the leading suspect in Emily's murder, might have killed Ferguson--and what to make of her gruesome discovery in Ferguson's freezer. No sooner has she finished the grisly re-examination of Emily, than word comes from Quantico that Lucy's sneaked into an unauthorized area after hours and is getting washed out of the program. Scarpetta's two nightmares come together with a crash--a car crash that sends Lucy to the hospital and Scarpetta out to the field to run forensics on her own automobile. As always, tension is ratcheted up, rather unconvincingly, by plots whose interconnection is never quite clear and by the constant friction between Scarpetta and her niece; her sister; her FBI lover, Benton Wesley; her boorish buddy, Capt. Pete Marino; and Emily's mother, with whom Marino is having an affair. But beneath the welter of quarrels and coincidences is as insidious a study of evil as Cornwell has turned in.
