A Cooperative Book Review

Reviews of Women's Books by Women Around the World

FIRST QUARTER, 1998

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Updated on Feburary 1, 1998

First Quarter, 1998

Alix Berenzy's A Frog Prince

Audrey Wood's The Napping House

Barbara Deming's Review of I Change, I Change: Poems

Barbara Helen Berger's Grandfather Twilight

Barbara Helen Berger's When the Sun Rose

Bonnie Pryor's The Dream Jar

Carol Anshaw's Aquamarine

Carol Heyer's Illus. of Rapunzel

Carol Queen's Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture

Carolyn Gage's Meditations for Women Leaving Patriarchy

Cynthia Ryland's Missing May

Deborah Hopkinson's Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt

Deborah L. Rhode's Speaking of Sex: The Denial of Gender Inequality

Dervla Murphy's Full Tilt: Ireland to India With A Bicycle

Diana Kappel-Smith's Night Life: Nature from Dusk to Dawn

Diane Davidson's Deadly Gamble

Doreen Rappaport's The Journey of Meng

Edith Forbes' Nowle's Passing

Ellen Orleans' The Butches of Madison County

Ellen Orleans' Can't Keep a Straight Face

Ellen Orleans' Who Cares If It's a Choice

Emily Arnold McCully's Mirette on the High Wire

Eve Bunting's Secret Place

Eve Bunting's Smokey Night

Holly H. Kwon's The Moles and the Mireux

Jane Yolen's Owl Moon

Janell Cannon's Stellaluna

Janell Cannon's Trupp

Jo Ann Kay McNamara's Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia

Jo Dereske's Miss Zukas and the Library Murders

Joyce Carol Oates' Foxfire

Karen Marie Christa Minns' Bloodsong

Karen Saum's I Never Read Thoreau

Kate Allen's Takes One to Know One

Katherine E. Kreuter's Cloud Nine Affair

Kathryn Phillips' Tracking the Vanishing Frogs

Keri Bowers' Single Pregnancy - Single Parenting

Laura Adams' Night Vision

Linda Smuckler's Home in three days. Don't wash

Lois Lowry's The Giver

M. Cathy Angell's My Spirit Flies: Portraits and Prose of Women in their Power

Marcie Hershman's Tales of the Master Race

Pat Murphy's Nadya

Pat Murphy's Points of Departure

Paula Martinac's Chicken

Rebecca Bartholomew 's Lost Heroines: Little Known Women Who Changed Their World

Ruth Sanderson's Papa Gatto, An Italian Fairy Tale

Sara Maitland's Ancestral Truths

Sarah Van Arsdale's Toward Amnesia

Susan Fox Rogers', ed. Close Calls: New Lesbian Fiction

Suzanne M. Marilley's Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States: 1820-1920

Toward Amnesia by Sarah Van Arsdale
Riverhead Books, NY 1995

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

I think I forgot something here; exactly whether or not I wrote this book, or could have written it anyway. Sarah Van Arsdale tells the first person story of a woman trying to forget her lover, who's left her for another woman, in a voice so hauntingly familiar and lyrical that hearing it is like being transported back in time to your own first love lost, your own obsessive heartache. It is a tale of loss and something else, of finding the core of who we are and why we love who we love, why we play out the scenes of our life with the characters we choose to be with, or are.

On Memorial Day she starts a journey, toward amnesia. Her flight from her obsessive love takes her far from home, in a sort of lurch toward virginal solitude on the shores of a northern lake island. On the way she drops her old life like taking off her clothes, strewing the tokens which make up the sum of who she is behind her as she puts on new garments better-fitted to self-abnegation.

Everything is changed, the way she takes her coffee, the hand she writes with, her name. Virginia Didelphis, she calls herself, an obscure sort of name for a mysterious process, the art of deliberately courting true innocence by forgetting everything that ever hurt her badly, an anti-oracle where the trick is to find no meaning, no history, behind the words and auguries of life but create them new and fresh as if sprung from the head of Zeus, unencumbered by family history or pain.

Funny, I seem to recall trying to do the same thing myself and suspect all of us have done so at some time or another, more or less. Moved to a new city, found new friends, changed our names even, or the work we do. No sacrifice is too great when our real motive is to lose ourselves in a kind of lesser and less final suicide.

Of course, suicide doesn't always work out the way we imagine. What if, at the moment of that final forgetfulness, we remember something we'd forgotten that we loved? Life itself perhaps, or something else so precious that we really didn't want to leave behind. Can we turn back to the door we locked behind us? Jingling through the keys and trying to find the right one, the one which lets us live? Or is it too late? Amnesia is the safer course, the one which lets us struggle back from the brink if we can or want to.

On the island, the new Virginia dives deep into the murky narcosis of losing her past but has time to observe the world around her, and herself, in a way she never could before. Seeing is her meditation and anodyne. Thoreau just lingered on the shores of his little lake while she plunges in, surrounded by it, immersed in the meaning she finds in everything, in ducks driven to extinction, in the Maine catamount which seems to be on its way out, and in the hope of coming back from extinction into the redemptive sensuality and urgency of life.

This is a superb first novel from a talented writer. Read it, you'll like it.

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Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia
Jo Ann Kay McNamara
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, 1996

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

This is a fascinating glimpse into the real lives of religious women in a particular tradition of Western Christianity but their history has a lot to say to any woman who questions the place women have had in history. The author speaks from a Roman Catholic perspective but her field is as broad as the scope of the Church's missionary endeavors have been. There is scarcely a corner of the world where Sisters have not made themselves felt and where their influence has not been a pivotal force for women in general.

We seem to hear of few women, especially religious women, and the exceptions, Hildegarde of Bingen, Heloise, Mary Magdalene, are often those associated with scandal or rebellion. The value of this book lies, to me at least, in rescuing from oblivion the contributions of women whose names we never hear, of Mme. Lidoine, who comforted the Carmelite Sisters in her charge as they were led one by one to the guillotine in revolutionary France, of the countless Mothers Superior and Abbesses who tried to defend the property and money of the Sisters from the greedy depredations of both the male Church and State from Medieval times to the present, of the martyrs who have withstood the calculated atmosphere of terror and oppression crafted through the ages to make women submit to the rule of men. She does not flinch from airing the dirty secrets of her own church as well as exposing the misogyny and prejudice religious women are still facing every day.

The martial sound of her title is not accidental. A feminist view of the Church militant and heroic informs every word. If you are Roman Catholic, or Christian, you should read this book to understand the historical reality of Christianity as it has affected women's lives and as women have changed the institutional basis of religious community. If you are a woman from a Western culture, this is also a history of how women have been treated apart from the men who so often defined what women could or couldn't be. If you are living on this planet of ours, you owe it to yourself to really understand an important influence on the development of Western culture, whose influence in turn has affected almost everyone now living.

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Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States: 1820-1920
Suzanne M. Marilley
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, 1996

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

Suffragists have been popular targets for ridicule and contempt for many years. This mirrors a general malaise about women which persists to this day in spite of, or perhaps because of, the gains women have made in personal rights and freedoms. Walt Disney made fun of British Suffragists in the 1964 prettified version of P.L. Travers' Mary Poppins. The Blake Edwards/Warner Bros. movie, The Great Race, a year later showed us that, although American Suffragists pretended to be independent and resourceful, their "natural" inclination was to rely on "women's" wiles and tears to get their man in the end.

Thirty some odd years have gone by since then and the Suffrage movement is still being trivialized or ignored; its impact on modern life taken for granted, and even belated honors, such as the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin have been so viciously attacked that they are now collector's items, a curiosity to be found in dresser drawers or jewelry boxes rather than in daily commerce, and feminist is a dirty word in many people's mouths.

But this book shows the important links between Suffragists and other liberal and progressive causes such as the Civil Service as a replacement for patronage, the Abolitionist movement, the Temperance movement, women's property rights and inheritance law reform, campaigns against child labor, prostitution, and the economic exploitation of women by unregulated hours and working conditions. The battle grounds kept shifting and strategies did as well.

When appeals to reason and "natural law" failed, they concentrated on the fear that women had of brutal men and drunkards. After the Civil War, they even flirted with racist and nativist arguments for a short time although those attempts to appeal to the least common denominator failed for the most part. When reactionary forces seemed in the ascendant, these early reformers concentrated on less "controversial" issues like personal development and women's "natural" inclination to safeguard the home and nurture children as being a safe and necessary balance to men's concentration on financial and political concerns, shrewdly playing whatever card seemed most likely to draw sympathy to their cause.

And in the end, they succeeded, not by winning over the great mass of men, who were still violently opposed to changes in the status quo, but by appealing to the sympathies and prejudices of the educated white men of the Federal legislature, and by "cutting deals" with the political machines of the day. This led to charges of elitism which are still being bandied about today, but it is important to remember that women's rights were a radical and subversive idea at the time. The great mass of men were opposed to even simple civil rights for women, much less voting rights.

In the end, the inventions and ingenuity of the Suffragists in America, including the sophisticated lobbying mechanisms they employed to bring unrelenting pressure to bear on individual Congressmen and Senators, the public relations techniques they skillfully crafted to combine many separate threads of concern, each with some level of popular support but not with overwhelming majority power, and other political stratagems into a winning campaign, won a limited victory, the right to vote, at the cost of compromises and concessions that left much undone.

Just as slavery was only sustained by brutal and terrifying force and the threat of death or torture, the subjection of women has been enforced by force or the threat of force throughout history. The Suffrage movement was no exception. For all the pious Victorian and Edwardian platitudes about the "elevated" position of women, that position did not save them from beatings and prison torture by the authorities or by mobs of men. They had the difficult task of changing an oppressive world while surviving the many battles and inevitable defeats to continue the struggle on different ground. It is not really our place to quibble about the means they employed to win and the author points this out very eloquently.

So even in victory, the newly won right to vote did not even come close to elevating the position of women from second-class citizen to full-fledged representation in the body politic or other areas of civil and economic life. Even a casual glance at any of the houses of our various legislatures or the boards of major corporations will tell you that women are grossly underrepresented in positions of power or wealth.

Both legal and extralegal means have been used to "keep women in their place" since the Nineteenth Amendment was passed and the politicians of the day knew it well. Just as the legal experts of the time could doublethink themselves into believing that citizenship did not necessarily mean voting citizenship, voting citizenship did not mean equality and the male politicians didn't worry for a moment that their power would be broken. They were willing to give a palliative sop to the Suffragists to buy some votes secure in the belief that things would largely go on as before. We will note that the Equal Rights Amendment is still a dream to be realized and not reality.

The liberal vision of the early feminists and suffragists has not yet been truly achieved, although the vote was an important first step. Those "Founding Mothers" did not believe that it would be the last step needed to achieve equality and they went on to fight in other battles for the most part. Let us dedicate ourselves to the same cause, real equality and freedom from the pervasive mechanisms of fear and control, some subtle and some overt, which are still being used to keep women "in their place."

This is a must read for any woman who considers herself as an heir of the struggles of other women to be free, or as a partner in the struggles of other oppressed peoples and races. This is even more necessary for those who don't but, sadly, unlikely to penetrate into the cocoon they have wound around themselves. Truth, Liberty, Justice, the heraldic motto of the Suffrage Movement in the United States, could as well serve for today as then. I haven't noticed any great surplus of these noble qualities lately, anywhere in the world.

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Smokey Night by Eve Bunting,
Illustrated by David Diaz.
Winner of 1995 Caldecott Award.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

A story about a riot, specifically the Rodney King riot in L.A. I think. The story is a good one, told from the point of view of a small child, and the illustrations/photographic collages are fascinating.

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Owl Moon by Jane Yolen,
illustrated by John Schoenherr.
Winner of the 1988 Caldicott Award.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

A mystical story about owl watching in winter. You almost need a jacket and boots to read this one!

Stellaluna by Janell Cannon,
Harcourt Brace and Company, San Diego, 1993.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

Stellaluna is a bat. Not the stereotypical bat, with fangs, who gets tangled in your hair in a dark attic, and strips you bald. Not that such things exist, anyway! Stellaluna is a fruit bat, who loses her mother during an owl attack before she is old enough to fly. She falls from the sky and ends up in a nest of baby birds. Who could not be more different than she is. They don't eat the same food, they don't sleep at the same times of the day, and they certainly don't sleep hanging upside down. Until Stellaluna arrives, that is. But Stellaluna is a minority creature in this family, so she must learn to do things "right". But right for a bat and right for a bird are very different things, so Stellaluna feels like a failure. Until she finds her kind again.

This is a wonderful story about differences, just right for young children who will feel great empathy for Stellaluna's attempts to do things "right", and who will love the pencil and acrylic illustrations of the bats and the birds. The illustrations are whimsical and imaginative, and as cute as can be. Grab a copy of this book, and the nearest child (even if they're 50), and share this lovely story.

Additional comment by Terre Poppe:

I just want to add to Lee's review of Stellaluna. This wonderful story is now also available on CD-ROM and I have that version too. I love it! There are songs on it as Stellaluna's mother croons to her, and other creatures add their own music to the story. There is action and "live" spots on the "pages" of this CD-ROM book, and you can get more information that is in the original story, which is also there. Some of the animations are silly and fun, some are kind of sad. I found them all interesting. The CD-ROM comes with a paperback copy of the book and a Stellaluna puppet. It's great fun. It's part of the Living Book series. I haven't shared it with a child yet, but Steph and I, both just big kids, adored it.

Additional comment by Lee Anne Phillips:

I want to second (or third?) both Lee's and Terre's recommendation of this great book. Janell Cannon has captured the very powerful feelings of loss and loneliness that a child would feel at the loss of her mother and related those feelings to the feelings anyone might have from feeling "different" from the people around her. The illustrations are absolutely superb and will reward a bit of study. The mother bat's (She doesn't die when the owl scares her! She's only lost!) search for Stellaluna is portrayed in the "decorative" frame of the text on each facing page, for example, and the droll expressions on Stellaluna's furry face as she tries to be a bird (and teach the birds to be bats) are absolutely priceless. Lee Lawton said that some of the illustrations made her laugh out loud in another review of this work and I'm sure that these must have been some of the ones she referred to.

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Trupp by Janell Cannon, 1995.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

Another cute book, with the greatest homeless woman you'll ever meet. You'll want to take her home!

The Journey of Meng by Doreen Rappaport.
Pictures by Yang Ming-Yi.
Dial Books for Young Readers, New York, 1991

Yang Ming-Yi's evocative paintings illustrate this Chinese legend retold by Doreen Rappaport. If your young reader enjoys stories about war, imprisonment, slavery, dictatorship, loneliness, deprivation, struggle, bad weather, exposure, hatred, disappointment, rage, lust, treason, betrayal, suicide, and butchery, I highly recommend this little book which has lots of baddies packed in a small amount of writing. Or maybe you could just take that little child to a movie rated R. Or spin a few cautionary tales from the Brothers Grimm. But I'd suggest not reading this to your child just before bed unless you love the sounds of screaming during the night.

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When the Sun Rose by Barbara Helen Berger.
Philomel Books, New York, 1986.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

A little story about light, a pet lion and friendship. Two little girls paint rainbows all day and thoroughly enjoy each other's company. Quite delightful.

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Grandfather Twilight by Barbara Berger,
Philomel Books, New York, 1984.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

A real bedtime story, with lovely paintings by Barbara Berger, who can somehow paint the quality of light, both sunlight, as in the story above, and moonlight. This story has very few words, but not many are needed in this metaphorical account of how the moon gets into the sky each night. The acrylic paintings are an integral part of the story, which is ironically not always the case with picture books.

A Frog Prince by Alix Berenzy,
Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1989.

Reviewed by Lee Lawtonllami@mail.teleport.com

Well, we all know the story of the frog prince, right? A rather nasty little spoiled princess gets a big favor from a slimy old amphibian, and has to kiss him and the rest is HIStory, right? Heh, heh, heh. Well, you're in for a bit of a surprise in this retelling of the old story. The illustrations are just great--the frog is a lovely old fellow with great facial expressions, and we see that spoiled little princess has a terrible frown, which will probably freeze on her face! Here we also have trolls, a green-faced witch, and beautiful animals, lovingly depicted by the author. I highly recommend this book for adults, too!

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Rapunzel from the Brothers Grimm,
illustrated by Carol Heyer,
Ideals Children's Books, Nashville, Tennessee, 1992.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

Just what you might expect--bad witches, good blondes, and a faithful retelling of the old story. What surprised me, however, was that all the trouble started when the wife wanted to get some of the rampion from the witch's garden to eat. And talked her husband into climbing the wall to get some. Now, I've been a vegetable gardener for years, and I must say that rampion is not a very common vegetable, nor a very common name. I doubt that many children would know what it was ("Now, you are going to sit there until you eat your rampion!"), and most adults would be hard-pressed to answer that "What's rampion, grandma?" question. Then you find out that Rapunzel means rampion, and about that time I'm thinking, "couldn't you have updated the story a little?" Who cares if Rapunzel means rampion—why not use apples instead? Oh, yeah, that was another story!

Well, the character's faces look pretty modern, even if their clothes do not. And I must also say that I have never seen such a sultry-looking Rapunzel! And after the witch cut off Rapunzel's braid, how did they both get out of the tower, so the witch could send her to a "deserted wasteland" to "live a life of great woe and misery"?

Maybe some stories really don't need to be retold nor to be re-illustrated.

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Mirette on the High Wire by Emily Arnold McCully.
G. P. Putnam & Sons, New York, 1992.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

This Caldicott Award winner by Emily Arnold McCully is one of many picture books she has written and illustrated. McCully's childhood habit of climbing trees and buildings makes its way into this story of Mirette's Paris, 100 years ago. The little girl Mirette wants to be a tightrope walker after seeing the Great Bellini practice his act at her mother's boardinghouse. But Bellini has a little problem, and Mirette has a lot of tenacity and spirit, and those things get together in a happy ending.

The watercolor paintings used to illustrate this book are quite lovely and detailed. But if your child loves to climb and be a daredevil, you might put away all the ropes before you read this one aloud!

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Missing May by Cynthia Ryland,
Orchard Books, New York, 1992.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

This is a story for young adults, which won the Newberry Award. It is about life and death and grieving, and how people don't want to give up the people they love. A heartwarming story, but I wonder why it won the Newberry.

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The Giver by Lois Lowry,
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1993.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

This was another Newberry winner, I believe, and much more deserving, in my opinion. A poignant story for young adults about a futuristic society where there is no crime, poverty, injustice, and where family values are taken seriously. There is also no freedom, no sex, and no philosophy. A truly moral book, in an old-fashioned sense, where the message is strong and powerful. I highly recommend this book to everyone over the age of 10.

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The Dream Jarby Bonnie Pryor,
illustrated by Mark Garham,
Morrow Junior Books, New York, 1996.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

In this story, Russian immigrants struggle and work hard for their dreams through the eyes of Valentina, who sees her family working to purchase a small store and feels that there is nothing she can do to help, trapped as she is in school. But soon (things are *always* soon in picture books!), Valentina finds a great way to help her family, and it happens that she helps by doing the thing she is best at. A feel-good story, with a bit of well-worn history, and lovely paintings.

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The Moles and the Mireux, A Korean Folktale by Holly H. Kwon,
illustrated by Woodleigh Hubbard,
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1993.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

Like many folktales for very young children, this straightforward story leads quickly to the conclusion that home is where things are best. A doubtful hypothesis, at best, IMO. But that's another story. Unusual, graphical paintings.

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Secret Place by Eve Bunting,
illustrated by Ted Rand,
Clarion Books, New York, 1996.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

Eve Bunting is a renown writer for children, having published many books dealing with "sensitive" topics. This one concerns a bit of wildlife in the urban jungle, and thus could probably be perceived as sensitive by some people. The story itself is rather dull, but that is more than compensated for by the beautiful watercolor paintings that tell the story better by themselves. A lovely book to share with a young nature-lover.

Papa Gatto, An Italian Fairy Tale by Ruth Sanderson,
Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1995.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

A wise and well-dressed cat loses his wife and is left with many kittens. What to do when you have an important job as advisor to the local prince? Hire a helper of course! A beautiful, well-dressed, long-haired *woman* helper of course. Who just happens to have no interest in the job, unlike her sister who closely resembles Cinderella, but who is *very* interested in the part of the job description that reads, "You chose your payment, no amount too great." Now, with this beginning, everyone could finish the book, right? Another fairy tale where everyone gets what they deserve--gosh, how did lies like that get started, anyway? ;-)

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Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt by Deborah Hopkinson,
paintings by James Ransome,
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1993.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

This is an informative and wonderful story about slavery and freedom. Twelve year old, Sweet Clara is taken from her mother to work as a field hand on another plantation. The work is too much for her, so "Aunt" Rachel takes her in hand and teaches her to do fine sewing. In the Big House, Clara hears of slaves escaping via the Underground Railroad, and she figures out how to help fellow slaves by sewing a Freedom Quilt. I think history is accurately and lovingly presented in this book, and the paintings complement the story perfectly. Highly recommended for children old enough to understand the concepts of slavery and freedom.

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Full Tilt: Ireland to India With A Bicycle by Dervla Murphy,
The Overlook Press, Woodstock, New York, 1965.

Reviewed by Lee Lawtonllami@mail.teleport.com

This is the first of Dervla Murphy's many extraordinary bicycling travel books. If you read the title carefully, you may have noticed that the preposition is "with" not "on". That is because throughtout this diary, she refers to her bicycle as a fellow traveling companion named Roz. Dervla and Roz accomplish what seems nearly impossible: bicycling from Ireland through Germany, Yugoslavia, Persia (now Iran), Afghanistan, over the Himalayas to Pakistan and India.

Full Tilt is mostly a compilation of edited diary entries, as Dervla recounts the events of her journey; not great literature, but a truly amazing feat. This journey exposes Murphy to cultures which could not be more different than her Irish homeland. With great aplomb and derring-do, she eats what there is to be eaten and adapts to expectations where possible. When not possible, she acts like herself, clothed in bicycle pants, in countries where the only part of a woman you can see is her eyes if you can get close enough.

One of the best things about Murphy's travel writing is that she seems sincerely aware of her own acculturation and biases. She does her best to leave as much of that behind as she can, while still acknowledging that she cannot become completely unbiased. She opens herself to what is before her, and with great spirit leaps into the experiences at hand. I look forward to reading more of Murphy's incredible travelogues.

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Nadya by Pat Murphy,
Tom Doherty Associates, New York, 1996.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

I sure enjoy Pat Murphy's writing. I am a new convert, but I'm doing my best to catch up. I recently read and reviewed two of her other books, The Falling Woman and The City, Not Long After, and enjoyed both of them. Murphy's genre is science fiction/fantasy, and I see from the publisher's blurb that she has also recently published a children's picture book, Pigasus.

Nadya is a book about werewolves. Usually, I would quickly put a book about werewolves right back on the shelf, as I am not interested in werewolf stories. But this book is really about people, people you will quickly come to care very much about, who just happen to become wolves one night a month. This novel takes place during the land rush of the 1830's. Nadya and her parents (also werewolves, of course), live near the Missouri wilderness. After hunters kill her parents while they are in their wolf shape, Nadya sets out toward the west, destination Oregon (good choice!).

Along the way, she meets Elizabeth, who has also lost almost all she has to lose, and their paths and lives become intertwined in love and adventure.

Murphy's hypnotic pacing will grab you by the second page. This is a book which, given a little time and solitude, you could read in one sitting. In fact, I recommend that you not even start reading it until you can let yourself sink comfortably into its well-researched evocation of that time in American history. I've read quite a bit about wolf behavior, also, and I think that Murphy has accurately portrayed them here.

Murphy's writing is a melodic symphony of complex relationships and cinemagraphic milieu, with hardly ever a jarring note.

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I Never Read Thoreau by Karen Saum,
New Victoria Publishers, Norwich, Vermont, 1996.

Reviewed by Lee Lawtonllami@mail.teleport.com

And now for a bird of a totally different color, unfortunately. This mystery novel begins with the author alone, with a dead body, on an island off the coast of Maine during a winter storm. It follows a cluttered series of flashbacks to return us to the events which constitute the "mystery". The only mystery I discovered here was how the book ever got published in the first place. It is a retelling of Murder is Germane, a previous Saum mystery, from a different character's perspective. I haven't read Murder is Germane, but this novel does not encourage me to do any further research. The writing is chatty and awkward, with a jocular tone that quickly becomes tiresome.

This is supposed to be a lesbian mystery, but there was more Catholicism than lesbianism here, not to mention more dysfunctional relationships than you can shake a branch at. Perhaps the real mystery is why all those women fell in love with that passive-aggressive tree butcher named Clara. The author does not explain, unfortunately.

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Single Pregnancy - Single Parenting by Keri Bowers
Park Alexander Press, 1996

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

Not everything goes as swimmingly as most pregnancy manuals seem to believe, and a woman on her own may have trouble relating to some of the advice given, which often relates to situations which simply don't arise in a single woman's life while completely ignoring issues near and dear to her heart. Keri Bowers has gone a long way toward rectifying that situation in her own addition to the literature of pregnancy and birth.

Of course she covers the basics, nutrition, exercise, the physiological changes which go on; but she also "tells all" about the other stuff, what to do if you don't know who the father is, including discussion of donor insemination, if the father won't acknowledge the child and requires legal coercion to meet his obligations, whether you want to involve the father at all, ramifications of whatever decision one makes on the life and well-being of the child, in short, a fairly exhaustive list of what real single mothers face every day, including potential poverty and dependence on an increasingly leaky welfare system.

The resource lists alone are probably worth the cost of the book. From support groups through crisis hotlines, she doesn't skip many problems that may arise in the life of a single mom, including personal crises like abuse from a boyfriend, drug problems, depression, and even loss of one's own ability to cope with the pressures of non-stop baby care. She explains how to deal with nosy or unthinking comments from friends or strangers, how to keep one's mental balance along with the dietary advice, and gow to make the very best of a situation which comes as a shock to many women and can be difficult for almost any.

In fact, about the only problematic pregnancy topic she stays clear of is the possibility of pregnancy as a result of criminal assault. I can't fault her for that as that opens up a whole new range of issues and probably deserves a book of its own. Her tone is decidedly upbeat, for all the problems she discusses, and her focus is on the rich rewards and joys a single mother can experience during pregnancy and after the birth of her child. This upbeat attitude seems mirrored in her own life, which she mentions in passing throughout the book and is fully disclosed in the final chapter. There are few obstacles which can't be overcome and she goes a long way toward helping a new mother-to-be come to grips with her situation in a realistic and empowering way. Not to be missed for a special audience or those that love them.

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Speaking of Sex: The Denial of Gender Inequality by Deborah L. Rhode
Harvard University Press, 1997

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

Prepare to get angry all over again. There are some problems so pervasive and unremitting that they either make you crazy or you learn to tune them out until they smack you in the face. The unrelenting gender-based inequality of our common culture is just such a problem and many of us are either crazy all the time or try to focus on other things.

Deborah Rhode is Professor of Law at Stanford University, a respected scholar, and Director of the Keck Center on Legal Ethics at the same prestigious university. It is an absolute certainty that, if she were to be interviewed in any major newspaper, or profiled on a major television network, there would be prominent mention of her marital status and children, if any.

The same is true for any woman. Become a prominent politician, say, Governor of the State of Texas, and you will be described as a "white-haired grandmother." Just today I saw an unflattering political caricature of Hillary Rodham Clinton in our local paper. Hillary was portrayed with prominent buck teeth and a huge nose, features also common in scurrilous portrayals of Eleanor Roosevelt from administrations past. Mrs. Roosevelt was hounded by an unforgiving press and accused of all sorts of scandalous things, as has Hillary Clinton, in hopes that some of them would "stick."

What Hillary and Eleanor have in common was the fact that they were both strong and independent women who refused to knuckle under and they have never been forgiven for it by many.

Professor Rhode has compiled a masterful assemblage of facts and theory in a very readable and accessible style, striking a rare balance between scholarship and a humane and coherent style of plain speech. There are neither unimaginative tables nor jargon to mar her presentation, yet there are substantial end notes and her reference list is superb, with a range of titles spanning the gamut of the popular press, law review journals, and works by other prominent university researchers.

One of the telling anecdotes which brought a wry smile (or was it a snarl?) to my lips was a description of a cartoon by Cath Jackson. In it, a male editor is seen lecturing a female staffer about the obvious problems in her story, headlined "Wheelchair Woman Climbs Mt. Everest." He reminds her of the "basics," saying "You've missed the main points: WHO is her husband? WHAT does he do? WHERE would she be without him? And WHY isn't she at home looking after the kids?"

Oh.... Yeah.... I forgot.

I had that feeling repeatedly while I was reading; I forgot about the subtle attacks on all women embodied in the self-serving hobgoblins of the "Welfare Mother in the Cadillac," the "Irresponsible Slut Getting an Abortion," and the "Ball-busting Feminist" so beloved of the right-wing-male; forgot that girls wishing they were boys is normal in conventional psychology while boys wishing they were girls is a pathological sign of mental illness. Until she reminded me. On almost every page she has a story to tell, a coherent part of her thesis, that women are systematically objectified as servile or sexual playthings and deliberately made the pawn in games of eroticized male domination of or violence against women.

At the same time she is scrupulously fair, courageous even, in presenting important feminist arguments against pornography as "hate speech" degrading to women, as promulgated by such women as Andrea Dworkin, Catherine McKinnon, and Susan Brownmiller while cautioning that the evidence is not yet clear that physical harm can result. That it is offensive and degrading can hardly be argued but the primarily anecdotal evidence on the association of pornography with rape and violence is quirky and open to many interpretations, according to her analysis. Of course Andrea Dworkin and others would counter that pornography is so widespread in our society that almost every male is infected with the pornographic worldview, that women "are asking for it," that men who force them into sex are doing them a favor. And it is telling that large numbers of boys (and a surprising number of girls) agree that forced sex is acceptable if a boy has spent a lot of money on a date. If the victim is seen as having "led the boy on," whatever the hell that means, the numbers are even higher.

It is not for nothing that "jokes" are told about rape victims, especially virginal rape victims, especially nuns, asking for a second rape to see "whether they liked it." One only has to hear the joke in mixed company to distinguish attitudes quite clearly by sex. Many men will laugh or "top" the joke with even more risqué and insensitive suggestions, while most women will either say nothing in embarrassed silence or roll their eyes in a dismissive/despairing gesture directed primarily to the other women present.

Intuitively, it seems obvious to me that some sort of physical consequence must ensue from the consumption of pornography but intuition and demonstrable fact are hard to connect sometimes. Commendably, as one might expect from a legal scholar, she resists the temptation to include the merely "obvious" mixed in without comment alongside the truly verifiable and the frankly speculative, a practice all too often associated with the popular press.

And the difference between intuition and fact is made abundantly clear by the subtitle of this book. A substantial number of people in this country, including policy makers and even some women, believe, or say that they believe, that women have achieved equality, that any problems they may have had were associated with past laws or attitudes. This view has been espoused (or at least mentioned - Ms. Paglia's rhetoric is, shall we say, less than rigorous in its logic and precision) by at least one lesbian and "feminist" apologist for male privilege, Camille Paglia (who also claims to be a gay male at heart), and a fairly large number of anti-feminist "debunkers" of the "myth" of female inequality. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

What's surprising, or maybe not so surprising to the cynical mind, is how well these books have been received, how talk-show-notoriety and even tenure have been showered on the women who wrote the books, many of dubious scholarly or academic reputation, and how much money it is possible to make with such a thesis. Just as we now find a few African-Americans claiming that racism and discrimination have been "solved," which fits a certain political agenda and which may richly reward almost any Black man who can say it with a straight face, we find women, mainly of upper-middle-class white backgrounds, aligning themselves with the Phyllis Schlafly (Fascinating Womanhood) camp who think that a man is doing more than his fair share of parenting chores when he reads the bedtime story and that a woman is not overburdened when all of the absences from work because of a child's illness are hers; that a woman who is raped "brought it on herself" because of "poor judgment" or "inappropriate dress;" or that the 95% of senior managers who are white males achieved their positions, in spite of comprising only 40% of the population, through innate ability and "hard work." It's only natural, isn't it?

In another context, I read a comment by a man of unusual perception who noted that he used to resent, as many men resent, affirmative action for women, woman-only organizations and professional groups, until he noticed in his own art classes that women fell more silent as the number of men in the classes varied upward, that it didn't take too many men in a class before almost no women spoke at all, and that the few women who did speak were acknowledged in a perfunctory or even a dismissive manner while the observations of men were greeted far more effusively on the whole. The ego strength required to acknowledge this simple fact of female existence can only be inferred by the fact that so few men agree with him. It's only natural, isn't it?

Well, no. It's not natural. But these attitudes and behaviors are so ingrained in our culture and society that they are invisible to many people, a part of the very air they breathe, or are, for women, a low-level irritant so long habituated to that it is difficult to respond to a new instance of the same old crap unless the conduct is so outrageous that it's impossible to ignore.

OK, we all have pet peeves or incidents that we remember; I'm no exception, but this book presents the data so effectively and demonstrates the almost-universal deleterious effects of sexual inequality and discrimination on the everyday lives of women and which has not changed all that much since Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that the sum total is overwhelming and depressing. I begin to think that I won't live to see the end of it, although I was both enthusiastic and optimistic in my youth.

That's what made me mad.

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Deadly Gamble by Diane Davidson
Rising Press, 1997

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillipsleeanne@leeanne.com

Fans of Toni Underwood, the butch cop and heartthrob of Deadly Rendevous (Rising Press, 1994), will enjoy Ms. Davidson's latest foray into the genre. Toni's off the force now and her lover is an anguished memory as she is drawn into the tangled and unconventional life of her Aunt Vera Valentine, a woman of independent means who harbors more than one secret and more than several interesting friends (and enemies) among the reminders of her scandalous past in a Las Vegas setting particularly appropriate for a fast-paced adventure of dangerous dark cars and bullets from out of the night. Vera reminds me a little of Auntie Mame, the Rosalind Russell version, not later imitations, but with more people around her with reason to kill her. And there do seem to be quite a few of those.

Aided by her former partner (in cop language, that is), Sally Murphy and a cast which includes her aunt's best friend, a flamboyant homosexual "queen" named, believe it or not, Royce Ballard (did anyone else miss this until the second time around? ) While the characters are stereotypical, the breakneck-pace demanded of the mystery genre almost demands that characterization be secondary to plot, and that action take precedence over all. It's a satisfying read for mystery lovers, and the next chapter in a series that will attract many loyal followers.

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Miss Zukas and the Library Murders by Jo Dereske
Avon Books, New York, 1994.

Reviewed by Lee Lawtonllami@mail.teleport.com

This is the first in a series of Miss Zukas mysteries, which now total four. Too bad I only had this one from the library--this is the kind of book that makes you want to gather all of the mysteries in the series, turn off the telephone, make a little fire in the fireplace, and just soak yourself in the warm bath of fun reading all weekend! Miss Zukas is just what you'd expect a librarian to be, except she doesn't get freaked out when a body is discovered in the fiction Mo-Ne aisle. The police questioning only gets Helma, aka Wilhelmina to her mother Lillian (named after Lillian Gish), aka Helm to her friend Ruth (the artist who is pretty far out, indeed); aka Miss Zukas to Mr. Gallant, the handsome police chief who questions her at length about what he knows she must know but isn't telling, in further and further until her life and the life of her friend is much in doubt.

Miss Zukas is a public librarian in Bellhaven, Washington, a small town near Seattle, and the hazy, foggy, misty sense of western Washington permeates this book. You're never far from water near Seattle, and you're always aware of the sailboats and the muted light of that city while you read. Even better for that fireplace chair!

And the best thing is; well the next-best thing is, that who-did-it remains a mystery until almost the end, and why-who-did-it remains a mystery until shortly after that, and there are still three more to go, already in my local library, and surely Jo will write a few more real soon.....won't she? She apparently gave up on SF after 1990, but those might be worth checking out, too. If you like mysteries, libraries and librarians, you'll like Miss Zukas--Helma to us. Just don't call her Helm--only her friend Ruth does that and Miss Zukas...er....Helma, always corrects her.

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Nowle's Passing, by Edith Forbes (also wrote Alma Rose)

Reviewed by Terre Poppe

Having lived in New England and been married to a New Englander, I found the characterizations to be accurate of at least some of the people who live there. I appreciated the insights, provided by Vincie, into the behaviors of these Vermont people. They helped me, in retrospect, understand my outlaws a bit better.

The sparseness of New England in winter comes through clearly in Forbes' writing. It is reflected in the leanness of the characters' presences. Yet Forbes made each main character alive and distinct for me.

Vincie is clearly the protagonist here and we sometimes see the others as she sees them. We also see the others as they project themselves. I liked this method very much. It rounded out the characterization a lot for me.

Vernon Nowle

(father, landowner, killed by a bullet to his head, catalyst for this story)

Chad

(did he murder their father?, charming, sells ideas)

Darrell

(science teacher, child most like father)

Gerogeanne

(Darrell's wife and teacher of accounting)

Vincie

(only daughter, trying to make sense of the family and her heritage)

Gifford

(Vincie's husband, professor, egocentric and pretentious)

Bret Leroux

(police officer investigating death)

I found it interesting to see how the children in the family related to each other, as children as seen in the remembrances, as adults still following some of the same patterns.

I liked this book a lot. Forbes' writing drew me into the world of the Nowles family completely.

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Tales of the Master Race by Marcie Hershman.
Harper Collins, New York, 1991.

Reviewed by Lee Lawton llami@mail.teleport.com

It is 1939. A small town in Germany. All the Jewish men are Israel, all the Jewish women are Sarah. This is ok. They will soon all be transported to Poland anyway. The Reich is so successful that a new mapmaker moves to town, knowing that good German citizens will want to keep up with images of the new Europe--all belonging to Germany.

A happily married young wife leaves her husband, a low-ranking police officer unwillingly in charge of beheading prisoners, for his boss, the chief of police. A young girl plays with her best friend, the invisible Franz, and convinces him to join the gymnastics program at school, part of the regimented athletics programs promoted by the Reich. As the doctor checks over the children and their records, to be sure they are healthy enough to participate, she giggles to hear Doctor say that he cannot see Franz. Invisible, right? No, Jewish, and therefore undeserving of the good doctor's attentions. A woman in hospital after suffering a stroke hears children being herded down the hall and into a transport vehicle. Hospital staff sympathize with her stroke-caused hallucinations. Fortunately, she is able to show her improvement to her doctor, who otherwise would have included her among the transports, despite her loving husband's devoted attention.

As in any small town, eventually you find that everyone is related in some way. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different person, and chapters return to their lives as the war progresses inexorably to its dreadful finish. The bonds among the Aryans in this small town are subtle, tenuous, and yet as complete as a spider's web. Through the quotidian details of ordinary lives, the awful truth of the war is made clear. The rhythm of the writing is as measured and sure as a funeral march. The scenes of the lives told here are as memorable and scratchy as old home movies.

I've heard that Marcie Hershman was May Sarton's favorite author. Ms. Sarton has high praise for Ms. Hershman on the back cover of the book. After I read a few chapters, I turned to the back flyleaf to find the face belonging to the woman who wrote this extraordinary book. Young (b.1951), sassy, alert; a small smile on the face that must have been reincarnated from Nazi Germany, memory intact. A writer most deserving of praise from such greats as May Sarton and Rosellen Brown.

Ms. Hershman has published another novel since Tales, her first: Safe in America, was published in 1995. I'll be reading that one next.

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Chicken by Paula Martinac
Alyson Books, LA, NYC, 1997

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

All of us come of age if we survive, some sooner and some later. Anyone who knows Paula Martinac's other books, the marvelous Out Of Time and the touching Home Movies won't be disappointed by this hilarious look at dyke life at 40. Lynn, our heroine, has been dumped by her long-time lover for the familiar reason: "We've grown apart." This always seems more persuasive to the dumper than the dumpee and Lynn is neither persuaded nor happy about it until she meets Lexy, and then Jude, and then things start to get *really* complicated.

It all takes place in the middle of a community so openly gay that when straight people wander in they look like they've just stepped out of a cave and into the light, blinking their eyes and looking around in wonder before retreating to the safety of their caves. I haven't laughed so hard since the early Stoner McTavish books. Buy it, you'll like it.

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Night Vision by Laura Adams 1997,
Naiad Press, Tallahassee

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

What would you do if you couldn't sleep, not just one night but on and on as terrifying nightmares tormented you and even carried on into the day? Would you think you might be going crazy? Would music playing in your head during your waking hours push you over the ragged edge and into despair?

But what if you tried to get help and discovered that some of the other women in your group were having the same nightmares? And they were all lesbians? That the music was the same for all of you and was being played from a radio station hundreds of miles away.

This intriguing premise is the beginning of an otherworldly romantic adventure that starts with the protagonist questioning her own sanity and finishes in a desperate struggle to rescue a woman held captive by a cruel and greedy madman and his mentally-defective accomplice. So the question really is whether it's insane to feel bombarded when suffering is real? Should we all hear voices in pain and anguish when they are all around us, women dying, children beaten and bloody? Who is really insane, the people who hear or the ones who turn away, try to shut out the voices, and succeed?

The culmination is a satisfying crescendo of high romance. For anyone who keeps hankies around for really great endings, this is a winner.

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Cloud Nine Affair by Katherine E. Kreuter 1997,
Rising Tide Press, Huntington Station, NY

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

You'd think there be some sort of conflict of interest laws in the missing persons business, although of course PI's have always felt free to take the client's money and promptly forget about who pays them in the interest of justice. If only lawyers and politicians were so public-spirited. Fans of Kreuter's Fool Me Once will be pleased to follow the adventures of Paige Taylor as she runs up against some very tough customers on the road to PI enlightenment in the Himalayas.

The cast of characters includes enough mysterious pasts and significant glances to fill an entire car on the sadly-defunct Orient Express as well as a few free-wheeling relationships and guns to remind us that, hey, this is the ninetys. We're all modern people here. No sly assassination attempts with poison darts from the Brazilian jungle here, these guys have guns. And they're pointing them at me. Of course it all turns out right in the end, but we have some thrilling times along the way. Whew!

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My Spirit Flies: Portraits and Prose of Women in their Power
by M. Cathy Angell 1997,
Bay City Press, Bellingham, WA

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

What did we ever do before there were coffee tables? There are some books that just beg for a larger format than will fit in most bookcases and this is one, an almost square paperback, and perfectly sized for the portraits by Cathy Angell which fill every other page.

So many times a picture makes us want to know something more about a woman, who she is, what she was doing when the picture was taken, and in this book that wish is fulfilled; each portrait, a snapshot of a woman doing what makes her feel best and most powerful, is accompanied by a brief note from the woman in the picture explaining what she was doing and how she felt at the time. These are portraits with names and, if not history, then a sense of the present moment, the now that any photograph tries to capture and so often fails to do. These are successful, I think, for each makes you want to know still more, like they were the pictures of distant cousins you just ran across in a photo album. "Who's this?" you say, and knowing your relationship is not enough, you want to know where they are now, right this minute, and rightly so. These women are family.

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Home in three days. Don't wash. Linda Smuckler
Hard Press, 1996

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips leeanne@leeanne.com

Double exposure: the juxtaposition of differing images on film, overlaying each other in ways which may illuminate, or conceal. Double exposure: doubly exposed. The metaphor of the double exposure is used to good effect in this recent book of prose poems, which exposes more of the author than one usually sees, both in print and on the accompanying CD-ROM, which contains an interactive multimedia interview with and reading by the author with cinematic interpretations of, or backgrounds to the poems.

Some of them remind me of lavalamps, inchoate shapes floating in viscous motion which resemble nothing so much as what we put into them, slowly coalescing into a meaning which drifts at the edge of consciousness. So we see the author's portrait overlaid with Gertrude Stein, that scandalous woman of the thirties and contemporary queer icon, in a kind of psychedelic light show, a wet show in mime. Other visions might call to mind Paris, or the hieroglyphic language of architecture, or the sky above, personalized with the experience of the artist herself, an experience mediated by images as startling as the first:

I stopped home at lunch because I left my cock on the bathroom sink

• Linda Smuckler, Trash

This is obviously no ordinary woman.

And this is no ordinary love affair, but rather the narrative record of a progression from uncertainty through longing to rage, an exhibition of the desperate degradations we willingly embrace in the midst of carnal passion, and the mingled lows and highs of a truly physical relationship.

It's not everyone's experience, nor everyone's eroticism, but then what is? I can't say when I'm been more charmed by a presentation. The multimedia interface will be familiar to most people who have ever experienced Myst or other interactive CD-ROM game; one uses the mouse to click on parts of the picture and things happen. One can click on the box, for example, which pops up a small TV whose channels you can change to choose any of the half-dozen poems available on disk. There are touches of sly humor here as well. I won't spoil the fun by giving away the secret but you will see the joke if you play it.

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I Change, I Change: Poems by Barbara Deming,
edited and with an introduction by Judith McDaniel
and a preface by Grace Paley,
New Victoria Press, 1996.

Reviewed by Elliott Writindyke@aol.com

This review is of a collection of poems written by one of the leading anti-war, feminist, lesbian, political activists of our times. Sound like fun? (Hey, you out there, stop groaning!)

Let me start with this poem:

I had leaned always to the wind and thought me lover
of the stars
but tonight
there is no wind and no stars
and
I am desiring oh so your breasts

I had thought it was the wind sung in me
Tonight there is no wind
I had thought is was the stars burned in me
and no stars
and here is this burning and this singing in me.

Or how about this one:

wet earth to my lips
i sing
o and to touch her breasts with gentle fingers
o and to touch
slant-fingered
o
and to touch slant-thrill-fingered
her warm breasts
i weep to o wet earth and my fingers
where my fingers sing
ohgodohgodhogodohgodohgodohgod

These poems were written by Barbara Deming. When she was 16. In 1933.

And they were written to her much older neighbor and first lover Norma Millay. You'll find them in the collection of her poetry called I Change, I Change, released last summer by New Victoria Press. Barbara arranged the poems herself, shortly before her death from cancer in 1984. The book is, by her choice, in sections, each one dedicated to a woman with whom she shared a significant relationship. The first poem is the one she won a Friend's Academy Prize for in high school in 1933. The last poem, "A Song To Pain", had final lines written the night before her death. In between, the poetry charts not Barbara's activism, but her loves and her struggles with her family and herself. Struggles and pains, decades old now, that still deeply touch our own lesbian lives: knowing how and when to come out, being overwhelmed by the power of a crush, trying to know what kind of relationship to have with her lover's other lover, trying to live a sane life while involved in a horrible custody battle, and the special pain of having a woman lover leave you to marry a man-- and not just any man, but your own brother.

Barbara is, of course, famous for her activism, such as her trip to North Vietnam during the war, her participation in civil-rights marches through the south and her anti-nuclear protests, as well as for her speeches and her essay collections, including Prison Notes, We Cannot Live Without Our Lives, and Remembering Who We Are. But Barbara wanted to be remembered as a poet, even though very few of her poems were ever published in her life, and most of her friends never even knew she wrote poetry. Why this silence? Barbara herself, in 1982, said that, "perhaps it is my sexual self who is my poet ... My sexual self and my rebel self, I might say." And it is precisely this sexual self which had to publicly suppressed for so many years.

When Barbara showed her first precious poems, such as the ones I've quoted, to her beloved college advisor, she was of course told not to write such things. When Judith McDaniel began sorting through Barbara's literary estate, she saw, in the upper corner of several of the earliest poems, written in Barbara's handwriting, the word "omit."

Judith says about this, "I don't know when the word 'omit' was written on those pages, but when Barbara compiled this group of poems, she reinserted several that had been omitted for so many years. I have added several others that I found in her files, her journals, poems I presume she would have wanted to use if she had remembered them. These poems are part of our heritage, and the word 'omit' is our heritage also."

Always omissions, and silences. But Barbara wanted to be remembered as a poet, and so I'll close with her words, singing about her loves. Most of the poems in this collection don't have titles, so I'm citing section titles and page numbers.

from "South Mountain Road, 1939-1940" written after Vida had married Barbara's brother, page 72

My bonnie lies over the ocean
My bonnie lies over the sea
I love a girl who will never love me
I must undress down to the bone, take all the pictures off the wall
and remember who I am.

from "Jane, 1969 - 1984", page 136, from a poem titled "For Barbara Smith"

In place of words I find tears in my throat.
They have been locked in me
But now burst.
So much has been taken from us.
But we will take it back.
I sit next to you again--
My hand in yours.
They took this: our right to touch.
Black, white,
Woman, woman.
We take it back.
We take it back.

and, finally, also from "Jane, 1969 - 1984", page 119

My love is water.
I swim in her arms,
Struggling toward what new land?
Visions of it catch at my mind
As, buffeted, sustained,
I change, I change.
Life as it has been drowns,
The life I swim to groans: "Begin"
And I am born: Her glimmering smile
Draws me out of my skin.

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Review of Like There's No Tomorrow: Meditations for Women Leaving Patriarchy
by Carolyn Gage (Common Courage Press)
Should be in bookstores by late March

Reviewed by Elliott Writindyke@aol.com

Radical Lesbian Playwright Carolyn Gage has written many lines which have inspired, encouraged, and supported lesbian and feminist activists. In her new book, Like There's No Tomorrow: Meditations for Women Leaving Patriarchy, Carolyn has collected the quotations which have inspired and shaped her own vision, from women such as Harriet Tubman, Mary Daly, Virginian Woolf, bell hooks, Andrea Dworkin, and Toni Morrison. Along with each quotation, Carolyn has written a small meditative essay, explaining why these words have touched her, and how she sees them connected to a radical new vision of the world.

"There is today," Carolyn writes in her introduction, "a division between women who are political activists and women who are proponents of the personal growth, women's spirituality, and recovery movements. This division is not an accident. It is the kind of split that is fundamental to patriarchy. As long as women believe activism will render us martyrs or that focusing on our inner life requires political apathy, we will remain a subject people." Carolyn has addressed this split in her own life by studying the visions and methods of many other wimmin, and has offered to us the great present of this wonderful book on the tools and dreams of revolution building.

One example. Carolyn quotes Lyn St. James, "My mother taught me that the gas pedal will get me out of more trouble than the brake."

"Not surprisingly," Carolyn adds, "Lyn became a race car driver." Thinking about what this might mean, Carolyn continues, "In life, many women have been taught instinctively to retreat at the first signs of danger. Danger seems to be an omen that we have been going too far or too fast, or both. Which is logical, because in patriarchy women are not supposed to have any momentum or goals whatsoever -- except those we have internalized from men." But braking at danger hasn't worked to bring change, and so Carolyn ponders, "If a lifetime of retreat and withdrawal have only resulted in poor self-esteem and depression, maybe it's time to put the pedal to the metal in our lives. What if, the next time we are given a reprimand for some form of uppityness, we counter with an action twice as uppity? And if we are having poor luck in meeting some goal of ours-- what if we try setting one twice as high?"

And when we do resist, when we do cross that line, and we find ourselves alone, what then? Carolyn, who was all but banished from one community for daring to run a lesbian-only theatre, knows the fear of an isolated activist, and repeatedly comes back to the question of isolation throughout the book.

Near the beginning, she quotes Harriet Tubman, "I had crossed the line, I was free, but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land."

Having been attacked and trashed for telling the truth about her own life, about lesbian lives, Carolyn expounds upon Harriet's situation, "We've all read fairy tales: Telling the Truth results in rewards, medals of honor, parades, statues, promotion, gratitude from the whole village. But life is not a fairy tale. In real life, the truth-teller will be ignored, and if that doesn't work, she will be discredited." This, Carolyn acknowledges, "is a discouraging scenario for one who is expecting to be treated like a heroine." In our culture and time, "we can expect to be, like Harriet, strangers in a strange land, But also, like Harriet, there will be those few who have tracked our exodus from patriarchy, and who are themselves preparing to escape. In time, we will have the privileged company of those women who are willing to put everything on the line from freedom. And that is enough."

And this book, indeed, is enough. I've had a copy of the manuscript for less than a month, and it is covered with underlined passages and post it notes. Already, I find myself referring to it constantly, incorporating it into what I need to know about the world. You'll want to do the same.

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Close Calls: New Lesbian Fiction,
Edited by Susan Fox Rogers,
St. Martin's Press, 1996.

Reviewed by Elliott Writindyke@aol.com

Last December, I was in a terrible state, for me-- nothing I was reading was being good enough. I was actually starting books and finding them so unsatisfying that I wasn't even finishing them -- me, who is so transfixed by words that I read food boxes right down to the final unpronounceable ingredients. Not having books I wanted to read had put me right into a blue funk. Then, miracle of miracles, a book appeared in my PO Box, an expected present from a writer friend. Close Calls, it was titled, New Lesbian Fiction. I was in such a place, though, burned by so many bad or wildly inconsistent anthologies, that I didn't start reading it for several weeks.

And then, how I regretted the lost weeks! This is a wonderful collection of stories with only two things in common: they are all about lesbians living lesbian lives, and they are all well-written. None of these stories are about coming out, a conscious decision by editor Susan Fox Rogers, who explains in the preface, "... I wanted stories that were not focused on the process of becoming a lesbian, but rather ones that reached beyond this to look at how we live and love as lesbians in this world. This was partly my own literary desire to read something new in plot. But also, even though we each individually still have to come out, as a culture we are collectively far beyond that. i wanted to see what was in this wide-open field."

And a wide-open field this is -- stories with depth, re-tellings, pain and joy. In Close Calls you'll find a lesbian prostitute who sees only lesbian clients, an updated, lesbian version of Cinderella, stories about lesbians who kill and lesbians who are killed, dykes living with and dying from cancer, ex-lovers in all their varieties and complications, including an ex-lover's toddler son and his Barbie doll named Bob. There's even one straight woman, of sorts, who in the seventh month of her second pregnancy has her first lesbian affair.

The writing here is so good that I could possibly do no better than to read a few passages. First, a short piece from Ruthann Robson's story "Choices", set in New York City, about a lesbian prostitute and her minister's-wife client: "It is just past midnight, but the lights of the city flicker off the river and through my three windows, my three glass graces. I look west, out the windows, as if trying to see a future I could choose. But my horizon is interrupted by New Jersey."

Anna Livia's entry is the delightfully odd "Lightening Dances Over the Prairie Like Lust at a Nightclub" about a San Francisco lesbian who gets a teaching job at a University in a small town in one of the states that begins with the letter "I." Except, this being Anna Livia, our hero doesn't describe getting the job, but claims to have been rollerskating down a steep hill when she was picked up by a tornado and carried away:

"The tornado dropped me in a strange, flat, stubbly land, and though my house did not fall on the Wicked Witch of the Midwest, I did tread on the toe of an accredited DMV driving examiner, armed with a clipboard, who was, incidentally, the biggest, baddest-looking bulldagger I had ever set eyes on. For, when one is tornadoed out of California and flung down in a cornfield the size of several of the smaller states, Rollerblades are no longer a totally efficient transportation system and one is drawn, by some irresistible force, into secondhand car ownership."

Or, from Rhomylly B. Forbes' hilarious and touching story "When You Wish Upon the Moon" about a lesbian and her ex-lover, a crystal-toting spiritual type, who has actually gotten herself involved with Diana the moon goddess:

"It was pitch dark and totally silent, being too early in the year for frogs or crickets or other nocturnal peepers. It suddenly occurred to me that we had neglected to bring flashlights, and that's when I got really scared. Want some advice? If you can arrange your life to avoid prowling around a cold, haunted marsh in the middle of the night without a flash-light and with only a small stick and a mouthful of pebbles for protection, then that is certainly the way to go. Trust me."

Then there's this, from Gwendolyn Bikis, "Me and Cleo" about the summer love affair of two African-American young women: a rural Good Girl and a tough, street wise basketball playing butch who seems inevitably headed for reform school or jail:

"All the ways and whys of how we kissed: We kissed one time so deep, just because it felt so good, that afterwards, still dizzy, as I was dazedly signing on a form, I looked down at my hand, and I saw that I had mis-spelt my own name. Badly, in two places. We kissed one time so sweet, just because it tasted good, sneaked little dabs of lip sugar back behind the gym bleachers, so sweet that I forgot to stop, and we almost got caught by watchdog Coach Alberta: "What y'all doin' back up in there? Popping popcorn maybe?" We kissed so juicy, so flavor-full for days, sneaked inside the laundry room because the sneaking was so fun, I remember still the way her lips would feel. Luckily, because it is most likely I will never feel those lips on mine again. "