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Review Date: 6/24/2008
This is a beautiful book about a relationship between a grandmother, Tzedyll, and granddaughter, Shayna. It is also a romance, a story of friendship, and a story of conflicts between generations. Shayna is a Jewish lesbian, and this book is on opportunity to learn from her perspective. The book starts out a little slowly, but soon becomes very engaging. Newman is very skilled at characterization. You will very likely become emotionally involved with these characters.
Review Date: 6/24/2008
Helpful Score: 3
Lifestyles is Jackie Calhoun's first book and, for those of you like me who have read her others, ironically it might be her best. There is much more character and plot development than you typically find in a Calhoun book. Her central figures are Kate and Pat. Kate arrives at the family lake home running from a failed marriage of 24 years. Somehow, without her noticing, her husband has fallen in love with a much younger woman. Kate doesn't know what else to do but get away. At the lake she meets Pat, who is in the midst of a crumbling relationship of her own. They start out as good friends who enjoy sailing, swimming and just talking about things. This book covers a time span of almost two years, so you get a real chance to see things develop. Kate is trying to define her relationships with a number of people - her grown children, her estranged brother who returns to her life just in time to discover he's dying of AIDS, the mortician who wants to marry her, her dead parents, but most of all Pat. You get a good, but little less clear picture of Pat who is also trying to figure out where she went wrong in her relationship with Gail, but more importantly is trying to understand the pull she is feeling towards Kate. It's a well developed story and gives some very real glimpses of what just plain every day life is like when everything seems to be falling apart around you. If you like Calhoun's work, you'll really like this one.
Review Date: 6/24/2008
From the back of the book - Annie Heaphy, cab driving baby butch, lives a life of freedom in a shack on the Connecticut coast. Her dislike of Yalies and all they represent at first extends to beautiful, self-possessed Victoria Locke. Then they fall in love and both their worlds change forever. TOOTHPICK HOUSE is their story, but it is also the story of the women's movement, the changes it brings to traditional Lesbian lives, and the ways in which it affected all young women of the 1970s.
Review Date: 6/24/2008
When Margaret Donovan, the administrator of a Seattle women's health clinic, is hit by a car the day she finds out her partner has been embezzling funds from the clinic, she hires Laura Gilbert to represent her in a lawsuit against the man who hit her. As the two women recall, in parallel narratives, their search for justice, it becomes clear that truth is a slippery concept, constantly shifting from one person's perspective to another.
A Woman Determined recounts the history of a close-knit lesbian community and the consequences of crises upon that community, its members, and institutions.
A Woman Determined recounts the history of a close-knit lesbian community and the consequences of crises upon that community, its members, and institutions.
Review Date: 6/24/2008
Magalie meets Danielle, a fascinating French journalist who inspires her to return to France in search of the woman who gave her up at the age of five, and together they try to solve the mystery behind her mother's death.
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