Elinor reviews The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Danika Ellis

Like basically every other queer lady bookworm my age, Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith matter to me. Until recently, though, I hadn’t tried Sarah Waters’ other work. I read The Night Watch on a whim, and I’m glad I did. This quiet slice-of-life novel is slow, but I fell in love with the characters. This novel is told backwards, starting with a couple weeks in 1947, then covering a few months in 1944, and finally showing the events of a handful of days in 1941. It tells the intersecting tales of three women and one young man in London. Each is, in their own way, privately reeling from past hurt, and the reasons for their pain are teased out over the course of the book.

The novel opens with Kay, a masculine lesbian who is renting a flat from a faith healer. Kay spends her days walking, going to the movies, and visiting a friend she met as an ambulance driver during the war. The story soon shifts to Viv and Helen, friendly colleagues who each have secrets. Helen lives with her girlfriend, a writer named Julia, but to the world they pretend they are only friends. Viv has illicitly been seeing her boyfriend, Reggie, for years, and their once passionate relationship has fizzled. The narration also focuses on Viv’s brother, Duncan, a young man living with an older man who he calls his uncle. Duncan works in a factory, and once a week takes his “uncle” to the faith healer below Kay’s flat. When Duncan unexpectedly encounters someone from his past, it threatens to upend his life as well as Viv’s. Each character’s post-war life is presented matter-of-factly and with a tinge of mystery of what how exactly they ended up with their present struggles. Why is Kay lost and depressed? What keeps Viv with Reggie? Why is Helen so paranoid about her relationship with Julia? Why is Duncan underachieving and living with this “uncle”? What connects Viv, Helen, Duncan, and Kay?

The story then moves back years earlier, during the war, and provides a dramatically different view of the same characters and their relationships. The bulk of the story takes place in this period and reveals most of the reasons for their post-war malaise. Finally, the novel concludes with a single event in each character’s life that placed them on their course.

The book was heartbreaking and very beautiful. I loved the inventive structure and once I was invested, I cared about the characters. The horrors of the blitz are portrayed in visceral detail, as are other private horrors that the characters face. Discovering how each character ended up in their situation is fascinating, and incredibly sad. Waters knows how to evoke emotion without being cloying or sentimental, and she does not pull punches with this book.

I loved it, but other readers may find The Night Watch too depressing. I felt emotionally drained when I finished it. For me, it was worth it, but fans of happy endings might disagree. Whether or not you enjoy the book depends largely on the degree to which you engage with the characters, and not everyone will like these reserved Londoners and their private struggles. This is not a novel with an action-packed plot, which keeps the reader close to the main characters. If you don’t connect with the characters during the 1947 section, you probably won’t enjoy hundreds more pages with them. If you appreciate them, however, the book is haunting. I particularly felt for Kay, a gallant butch with the ability to stay calm in a crisis, whose bravery was essential in World War II but seems to have no place in 1947. I rarely see characters like Kay, even in lesbian books, though she incredibly true to people I’ve known in real life. I sometimes wished the book was just Kay’s story plus Helen’s, as I found Viv and Duncan sort of boring initially. By the end Viv and Duncan won me over, and Duncan’s 1941 scene was incredibly powerful and emotionally devastating, but Kay was still my favorite.

Did I like The Night Watch more than my long-standing Sarah Waters favorites? No, but it was gorgeous. I highly recommend it. Just keep some tissues handy.

Elinor reviews It’s Complicated by A.J. Adaire

Posted on January 14, 2015 by Danika Ellis

When It’s Complicated opens, Tori is a lonely lesbian in her mid-thirties, living on the Jersey Shore and spending all her time at the medical facility where she works as a night pharmacist and where her partner, Liz, receives care. Liz has been in a coma for three years following an accident. Doctors know that Liz will almost certainly never regain consciousness, and that even if she does she may need extensive care for the rest of her days. The life Tori and Liz shared for almost a decade is a thing of the past, and it’s made worse because Liz and Tori never legally formalized their relationship, so Liz’s homophobic parents make all her medical decisions. It was Liz’s parents who decided to keep Liz on life support even after it became obvious that she’d never wake up, something Liz would not have wanted. Liz’s parents also moved her from Philadelphia—where Liz and Tori lived, worked, and had friends—to a medical care facility in New Jersey. Tori left her job, her support network, and even her dog to be closer to Liz. Since the move, Tori spends six to eight hours every day talking and reading to Liz and visits during her work breaks too. Tori’s only friend is M.J., Liz’s nurse.

The bright spot in Tori’s dreary is situation is an attractive female runner who jogs near the boardwalk. Tori makes a point of visiting the boardwalk during the woman’s daily run, but feels terribly guilty for her attraction, which she thinks is disloyal to Liz. When Tori and the runner, Bev, meet-cute in the grocery store and discover that they’re neighbors, the friendship takes root instantly. Even more conveniently, Bev is single, gay, just about Tori’s age, also works nights, and is new in town and eager to make a friend. Bev has a tragic back-story of her own, and has been too insecure to go on a date in years. Her interest in Tori makes her want to change that, except, as Tori explains early on, it’s complicated. Tori considers herself to be in a monogamous relationship with Liz until one of them dies, and Liz is still technically alive.

All of that happens within the first few chapters. What follows is an intense friendship between Tori and Bev, and a lot of lesbian processing with friends, family, a therapist, and each other. Bev and Tori have fun and there’s a subplot about match making for their straight friends, but the meat of the book is two people trying to figure out the boundaries of their relationship. If more than a hundred pages of dissecting feelings about feelings makes your skin crawl, avoid this one.

But if you are in the mood for a novella rich in lesbian processing, It’s Complicated is a decent read. It’s inelegantly written at times and Adaire has a tendency to tell rather than show, but it’s a sweet enough story. I had fun reading this book, though I couldn’t quite believe the premise. I found Tori’s guilt about having a crush and the number of hours she devotes to Liz over the top given the number of years since the accident, Liz’s prognosis, and the excellent professional care Liz receives. Tori even worries she is being emotionally unfaithful to Liz by becoming good friends with attractive Bev, a fear that people in the book treat very seriously but I found hard to swallow.

There were a few other things in this book I found baffling. Liz’s parents’ unrelenting anti-gay sentiments came with no explanation. They were cartoonish homophobes with nothing much else to them. I don’t like flat villains, and I couldn’t figure out why they weren’t fleshed out as characters. Another head scratcher is that Tori never talks or even thinks about the life she and Liz had dreamed of having together. Tori and Liz were only in their thirties at the time of the accident and considered themselves committed for life, so you’d think they shared some vision of what that might look like. Tori misses Liz, but she never mourns any plans or hopes they had for the future. Liz was quite closeted for reasons I didn’t find believable in a modern, East Coast city. Taken together, these things reminded me of “tragic lesbian” stories from earlier decades, not from the book’s 2012 setting.

That being said and despite the sad subject matter, I found it a relaxing read when I suspended my disbelief. The biggest problem I had was that the ending felt rushed. Without giving anything away, a huge surprise appears after what seems like the climax of the book, and isn’t given the time to be realistic resolved. Most of the book unfolds at a slow and steady pace, but the last thirty pages are stuffed with information. It’s a jarring shift, and made the extremely tidy ending feel unearned. It’s unfortunate, because I would have liked the ending fine if it hadn’t happened so quickly. If you like angst and heaps of processing, I recommend it for lesbian romance fans, with a warning that the ending falls short.

Elinor reviews The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians: How to Stay Sane and Care for Yourself from Pre-conception Through Birth, Second Edition by Rachel Pepper

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Danika Ellis

After I got married earlier this year, a surprising number of people started asking if my wife and I were going to have kids, and when, and how we were going to go about it. The answer is yes, we’d like to in a couple of years, and I’d probably like to be pregnant. Perhaps prompted by these questions and my lifelong tendency to over-prepare, I picked up a copy of Rachel Pepper’s classic. With caveats, I recommend it to anyone interested in getting pregnant without having sex with a man.

I’m glad I read this book a few years before I was hoping to conceive, because I had no idea how expensive getting lesbian-pregnant can be or how long it takes, even if you don’t have fertility challenges. We’d probably go to a sperm bank, and I learned from this book that sperm is really pricey. I also learned that without fresh sperm it’s more difficult to get pregnant, but using fresh sperm (from, say, your best guy friend, via jar and a plastic tube) can put you in a murky legal position that allows your donor to claim parental rights and fight about custody. There is no perfect solution, and this helpful section of the book lays out the pros and cons of different gay lady conception options so you can find the best choice for you. It also covers in detail how to figure out when you’re ovulating, a necessity if you want to get pregnant with sperm donation.

Unfortunately I think if you read this book while trying to get pregnant, you’ll panic because it sounds like everything takes so long and costs so much. If you are interested in possibly becoming pregnant one day, or hoping to have a pregnant partner in the future, read this book sooner rather than later. It won’t nag you to have babies before you’re ready. It will provide useful information about the process so you’ll know about getting sperm and how to most effectively use it, what pre-pregnancy tests and nutrients you need, and how to determine your peek fertility days.

Where the book falters is in its prescriptions for your pregnancy, birth experience, and your parenting. Pepper’s opinions are presented as facts. Her passion for home births, attachment parenting, and breastfeeding, and against circumcision, make no allowances for people with different values or circumstances, and could needlessly make you feel guilty. I think this unintentionally is another reason to read this book before you’re in the thick of trying to conceive: when you’re trying to get pregnant, or you’re a new parent, people will give you a lot of unsolicited advice. Some of it will be terrible, very little of it will be necessary, and it will almost always be more about the person giving the advice than it is about you. If you can start tuning out the “right way to be pregnant/give birth/be a mother” noise you’re subjected to from Pepper, you’ll be ready for that same noise from strangers, friends, or relatives. But it would probably be tougher to question Pepper’s claims if you’re reading it while you’re waiting on a pregnancy test and you’re feeling anxious and vulnerable.

This book is also almost a decade old, and some of the information is out of date. For example, since I live in California and my wife and I are legally married, we wouldn’t have to go through second parent adoption if one of us has a baby. That wasn’t the case when the second edition of this book was published in 2005, and the legal preparations suggested in this book may be unnecessary depending on where you live. Likewise, Pepper’s information about charting your fertility was written before the age of apps, and now there are several apps that make it easy to keep track of your cycle, possibly much easier than the methods Pepper suggests. It did make me wonder if reproductive technology options have evolved too, and I’d want to do more research before I try to get pregnant.

[trigger warning: transphobic slur]

Another strange thing about this book is Pepper’s references to “tranny pops,” which sounds like a really offensive snack food. She’s trying include transgender fathers, but using a slur that’s often aimed at trans women just made me wince. It’s particularly strange because the book doesn’t mention trans women in lesbian relationships even once. Since I know a few trans women who date women, and a cis woman and a trans woman who have biological kids together, I thought it warranted a couple of pages. Even without bottom surgery, trans women can have fertility issues from hormones, so if they want to have a child with a cis female partner, they might need to do some planning. Or at least they could be acknowledged, since transgender men get a few shout-outs in this lesbian book.

I also thought the book was a tad more focused on single women than it was at lesbian couples. The book is rooted in Pepper’s personal experience, and she’s always been a single parent. The writing is mostly aimed at the person who’ll be pregnant, without as much exploration of the non-pregnant mom-to-be’s experience as my wife and I would have liked. I might eat my words on this, but Pepper spends a bit of ink preparing you, future pregnant women, for your possibly unsupportive, non-pregnant girlfriend who won’t take your pregnancy as seriously as you do. Clearly, people have this experience, but there are also plenty of dedicated non-biological lesbian moms who are there every step of the way. I wanted a little more support and advice for expecting mothers who aren’t pregnant and whose experiences are often minimized or erased. I also would have liked some suggestions about deciding as a couple how you want to parent and sorting out the conflicts that will inevitably arise between a pair of new moms.

If you want nothing to do with pregnancy, definitely skip it. But it is well worth a read if you’re interested in the subject matter, ideally a few years before you’re ready to conceive. Don’t make it your only pregnancy or parenting guidebook, and skip or side-eye Pepper’s advice after the section on conception. For the business of getting pregnant the lesbian way, though, it’s great resource.

Elinor reviews Down On the Other Street by Jennifer Cie

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Danika Ellis

This short story collection focuses primarily on bisexual characters, and all but one of the stories star a bisexual woman. Bi and pansexual women often get short shrift as characters, and it was great to read about bi women as main characters. The women in Cie’s stories were portrayed as everything from unapologetic to in love to angry to vulnerable, and above all, completely human. Just five stories long, and some of them quite short, this book is a quick read. It’s also affecting. Cie is an excellent writer with a lovely command of language. This self-published book does have a handful of typos, and my copy had a formatting error that put one page in the wrong story, which distracts slightly from the excellent quality of the work.

Four of the stories are written to a “you,” casting the reader in a role important to the narrator. I found this technique confusing in the brief, furious story, “F&F.” The vignette “The Five: Time With Red Freckles” pulled it off better, though I wished the story were a little longer and included more background information. “Intellectuals Are Fools,” a story documenting every person the narrator had ever kissed and retelling the tales to a former caretaker, reminded me a little of a Thought Catalogue article circa 2012. (That can be good or bad depending on your preferences). The technique worked best in the opening story “The Photo.” This moving relationship story makes the reader the beloved, and is the only story with a male narrator. By the end of “The Photo,” I had tears in my eyes. It managed to be touching without being cloying, and to be sweet while still remaining honest.

The final story, “The Blue Bullet,” about an extra marital, interracial relationship in the late 1930s and early 1940s, was the longest and most fully realized. I dare you to read it without having your heartbroken at least a little. Though many of the characters in this collection are searching for acceptance of their whole selves, the protagonist in this tale stands firm in her own identity, refusing to be defined by anyone else. The story was complete, but I found myself wishing it were a novel so I could dive deeper in the story.

I highly recommend this short story collection. It’s beautifully written, emotionally engaging, and puts bisexual women center stage. I’m also going to be on the look out for more from Jennifer Cie. She’s a writer worth reading.

Elinor reviews Down on the Other Street by Jennifer Cie

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Danika Ellis

Elinor reviews Little Black Dress by Linda Palund

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Danika Ellis

Linda Palund’s young adult mystery, Little Black Dress, starts with high school student Lucy Linsky dreaming about the funeral of her late girlfriend, Carmen. The story flashes back to the evening that Carmen was abducted and murdered, then flashes back again to Lucy meeting the mysterious Carmen and the teenagers falling in love. Just a few chapters later, Lucy begins to investigate Carmen’s murder, which has the police stumped. With some help from Carmen’s visiting older brother James, Lucy’s old friend Wendy and new friend Seth, and possibly a little intervention from Carmen’s ghost, Carmen’s murder is eventually solved, and Lucy learns some of her late girlfriend’s secrets along the way. First, though, the teenagers discover that Carmen was not the only young woman victimized by the killers, and find themselves in danger too.

The novel is well-paced, engaging, and I cared about finding Carmen’s killers. However, I was not prepared for the amount of sexual violence in this book, or the way it is discussed by the characters. From quite early in the book, you know that three males were involved in Carmen’s kidnapping and death. Without giving too much away, not all the killers were new to abusing young women, and investigating Carmen’s death leads Lucy to some of the predators’ living victims. These girls were victimized largely through coercion and exploitation rather kidnapping, and Lucy’s comments about them disturbed me. At one point Lucy tells the reader that some survivors of a serial rapist “let themselves be raped and kept their mouths shut,” as though they had the option of not “letting” themselves be sexually assaulted. At another juncture, she attributes other survivors’ silence about their sexual abuse to their shame at having “sunk” to being abused, without disagreeing with their self-blaming thinking. Lucy is the narrator, and no one challenges some of the subtle rape culture attitudes she expresses. Worse, toward the end of the book, a sympathetic character arranges for one of the suspected killers to be raped, the scene that is played for humor rather than horror. I also found the level of graphic detail about the many sexual assaults and about Carmen’s murder did not add to the story. At about the third detailed retelling of sexual violence, I wondered why I was reading this book, but at that point I was invested in finding out who killed Carmen, so I slogged through it. If I’d known how many scenes of rape and attempted rape I was in for, I would not have picked up this novel.

The most disturbing thing in this book, though, was all the shame and secrets about things that weren’t shameful. Despite living in present-day Westwood, Los Angeles, with at least one supportive, liberal parent and caring friends, Lucy remains closeted to almost everyone for the entire book. No one but Seth and a few people at a gay-friendly café in Santa Monica ever know that Carmen was more than Lucy’s best friend. She mourns her girlfriend without saying that Carmen was actually her first love. Lucy even possibly hinders the police investigation by hiding her relationship with Carmen when the police wrongly suspect Carmen had a boyfriend who could have been involved in her death. Though Carmen’s family came from the South and seemed to be more conservative, it didn’t make sense to me that Lucy seemed to accept herself as a lesbian but did not consider coming out or even discuss her motives for staying closeted. Midway through the book Lucy gives a little anti-butch rant that suggested to me that she’s less at ease with her sexuality than she claims, but it isn’t examined further. It’s uncomfortable to read a lesbian book where the young lesbian narrator bashes masculine women and stays unquestioningly and dedicatedly closeted.

The shame and silence doesn’t stop there, either. Carmen and her family lived with a troubling number of secrets long before Carmen’s tragic murder. More than one living survivor of the future killers is racked with shame over being sexually assaulted and is terrified of what people will think of her if they found out. The rapists should have been ashamed, not the victims, but no one ever says that. The killers are able to operate brazenly because of this culture of misplaced shame and secrecy, and yet this fact is never explored. In the end, the guilty individuals are found out but no one resolves to stop blaming exploited teenage girls for their abuse, or comes out, or challenges the structures that let sexual assault be an open secret in the first place.

I hesitate to recommend this novel, which is too bad because most of it is a decent read. I would be especially wary of giving it to teens, its target audience. Anyone who reads it ought to also read What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety by Jaclyn Friedman as a counterpoint. If Lucy had come out to her friends or family, if one of the survivors had refused to take the blame for her abuse, if anyone had challenged some of the troubling thinking in this book, I’d feel differently. But as it is, Little Black Dress was not what I look for in a lesbian mystery novel, and it probably isn’t what you’re looking for either.

Elinor reviews One Foot Onto the Ice and When You Know by Kiki Archer

Posted on August 13, 2014 by Danika Ellis

[This review contains some spoilers. -ed.]

Kiki Archer’s lesbian romantic comedy, One Foot Onto the Ice, and its sequel When You Know, are the fun tale of Susan and Jenna. Susan is an uptight teacher at the British boarding school she attended just under a decade ago. Jenna is her free-spirited former classmate, now a ski instructor in the Alps, who spends most of her off hours hooking up with every woman in her path. One Foot Onto the Ice begins when Susan leads her school’s week-long class ski trip, Jenna turns out to be the ski instructor. Jenna charms Susan, Susan fascinates Jenna, and it isn’t long before the two are sleeping together and falling in love. However, Susan’s repulsive coworker, Marcus, believes he and Susan are heading toward a relationship and that Jenna has conned Susan into sex. Marcus sets out to wake Susan up to Jenna’s supposed lesbian trickery. Jenna’s recent fling, Amber, would like to be more and stirs up plenty of trouble for the couple as well. The students, ages eleven through eighteen, provide some entertaining and interesting subplots.

When You Know is what happens in the months that follow that whirlwind fling, with Jenna and Susan attempting to build a relationship despite being in different countries, having dramatically different social lives, and being pretty new at the whole serious girlfriend thing. Their efforts adjusting to the relationship, and the resolution the sequel provides around secondary characters like Marcus, ties up the loose ends of the first book nicely. This book also deals with social media use and the problems it can cause. By the end, When You Know finally gets our heroines living in the same place, with compatible lives, and both characters are a bit more mature. Reading the sequel resolved most of the few concerns I had about its predecessor, which is one of the best things a sequel can do.

These books are campy, full of slapstick, and made me laugh. They are mostly light, and easy and fast reads. I enjoyed them a lot. Archer manages to show Jenna and Susan’s chemistry through delightful banter. While it indulged in some clichés, Archer made these forgivable. Yes, Jenna and Susan are in love and in a “committed” relationship after less than a week, with Jenna making some major life changes because of it. Yes, Jenna goes from having sex half the women on the mountain to dedicating herself to monogamy with Susan at breakneck speed. But they’re also twenty-six, both inexperienced in relationships, and caught up in powerful feelings and an exciting connection. They also both have flaws in their judgment, with Susan incorrectly convinced in both books—despite all evidence—that Marcus is harmless, and Jenna oblivious to the possibility that her instant-romance with Susan might tick Amber off or, in the sequel, that going out drinking until 5 a.m. on her first night away from her brand new girlfriend could stir up Susan’s insecurities. These hints at naivety make it more realistic that they could jump into a “serious” relationship after a couple of days. Susan voices some reasonable doubts in the second book, which helps too. I’m not sold on their relationship being an easy one in the future, but I was thoroughly convinced that people might behave like they did and feel the way they felt.

I was less convinced of Susan’s innate sexual prowess and quick adjustment to her new lesbian identity. Susan had very little sexual experience, none with women, and was not even aware of her attraction to women until Jenna entered the picture. She goes from considering Marcus as her best romantic option to being comfortable as Jenna’s girlfriend exceptionally quickly, with no exploration of whether she’d ever had feelings for women before or whether she’d ever been attracted to men either. She and Jenna have mind-blowing sex almost as soon as they attempt it (though this is preceded by an endearingly awkward scene of Susan trying to rid herself of pubic hair as soon as she sees Jenna naked, with disastrous consequences). The sex scenes are pretty hot but sometimes a little over the top.

It is a romance though, and a very entertaining one at that, so I’ll grant it leeway. I recommend these books to anyone interested in lesbian romance. The books are best together, and as a pair they make one of the most fun lesbian romantic comedies I’ve read.

The Lesbrary

Lesbian and Bi Book News and Reviews

Tag Archives: Elinor