Karelia Stetz-Waters reviews And Playing the Role of Herself by K. E. Lane

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Danika Ellis

Romance is my favorite genre. It’s my comfort food. And, like bread pudding, romances are easy to find and rarely awful. The catch is it’s hard to find ones that are noticeably better than the rest. It’s harder still to find ones that are really great.

In the world of lesbian romance, I’d give And Playing the Role of Herself a “noticeably better.” It gets a “two thumbs up” if you already like the genre.

K. E. Lane gets all the basic elements right.

The protagonists are likeable, and their growing intimacy is well developed.

The sex scenes are frequent and detailed enough that I felt like I got my money’s worth. However, they are not gratuitous or embarrassingly anatomical. Nor does Lane fall prey to any unfortunate metaphor usage. The waves of pleasure did not crash over the shore of her womanhood, and that’s a good thing in my book.

Additionally, the obstacles to the protagonists’ love are plausible and do not rely on either character being stupid or cruel. I hate romance novels where the obstacles derive from one person having the emotional intelligence of an area rug while the other acts like an angry pit-bull.

In And Playing both women are closeted actresses. The pressure of their jobs and the media spotlight in which they find themselves present good reasons why they cannot simply skip off into the sunset on page 50.

All in all, it was a thoroughly satisfying read with a good happy ending.

I have only two complaints.

One is that Lane has not written anything else.

The other is a bit more technical. And Playing is written in the first person, and I never quite believed that the first person voice was indeed a successful Hollywood actress. To be fair, the protagonist, Caidence, just landed her first big role. She is new to fame. However, she is successful enough to own a house, to drive a sexy convertible, and share a trailer with one of Hollywood’s hottest stars. She’s not the girl next door – but that’s how the narrative voice reads. Caidence sounds like she could be a middle school science teacher or a friendly postal carrier.

I know people who have worked in Hollywood. Even the ones who work on the periphery of the entertainment industry or worked in Hollywood years ago have a unique way of seeing the world. I did not get that from Caidence.

In particular, I was struck by the way the narrator describes her beautiful girl friend Robyn. The descriptions are good, but they sound like the things I would say about a beautiful Hollywood actress. The only problem is that I am an English professor from rural Oregon. In the world of Hollywood stars, where beauty is a commodity everyone buys and sells, there is a different vocabulary.

This would be a minor quibble except that Lane misses out on some opportunities to enhance the intensity of the novel. If we really felt what it was like to be in the media spotlight 24/7, if we really understood the ways Hollywood can make and break people overnight, the plot points would pack a greater punch.

With that said, I didn’t pick up And Playing the Role of Herself because I wanted a treatise on Hollywood culture. I wanted to read a story about nice women falling in love. Romance is my comfort food. Sometimes it is okay for a bread pudding to be just a sweet treat to enjoy at the end of a long day or a frazzled week. If that is what you are looking for, And Playing the Role of Herself will not disappoint.

Review by Karelia Stetz-Waters
www.kareliastetzwaters.com

Casey reviews Licking the Spoon by Candace Walsh

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Danika Ellis

Candace Walsh’s book, Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity, had me from the very first page, which features a sensual description of making seafood-mushroom risotto in a steamy, cramped New York apartment kitchen. Right off the bat, Walsh displays her talent for evoking rich, palpable settings, and she continues to do so throughout the memoir, drawing full, memorable pictures of childhood homes in Long Island, sketchy college apartments in Buffalo, and airy, open New Mexico kitchens bathed in sunlight. Food, of course, is central to each of these places and the different times in Walsh’s life. Although Danika is right when she writes in her review that the memoir is less about food than food is an ongoing theme, Walsh very effectively uses food as a lens through which to examine and explore her life’s ups and downs.

For example, she manages to make even the most bare bones pea soup recipe appealing, clearly because the recipe was learnt from her straight college roommate, for whom she experienced a pining, unrequited love. The soup, comprised of only peas, onion, water, and salt and pepper, has a kind of spiritual cleanliness and simplicity that Walsh was yearning for at that time in her life. It’s also at this period that Walsh discovers the vegetarian cookbook writer Mollie Katzen’s books, which inspire her to this brilliant vision of “an orderly yet creative life”:

“I could wake up, do a series of yoga poses in my tidy, spacious bedroom, drink herbal tea in my kitchen, eat homemade yogurt and granola for breakfast, and ride my bicycle to campus, where my assignments would be complete in a satchel and my classmates would wonder about me, a mysterious human being who was winsomely beautiful and smelled faintly of lemon verbena and lavender. I couldn’t have been further from that persona.”

The clincher, of course, is the last sentence. There’s something about this idealistic dream of being a well-adjusted, serene person everyone admires that I deeply identified with. You know in your heart of hearts that it’s unreasonable and unobtainable, and that it’s not even really you, but the hope persists. This is a lot of what Walsh’s journey is about, actually: that convoluted route to a person and a life that is healthy, and good, and that feels right for you. Part of this is her discovering her queer sexuality, but that’s only one piece of the puzzle. In her review on AfterEllen, Jill Guccini aptly describes what else is going on: “the complex ties of family, … the sometimes cruel world of childhood and the demons that haunt the people you love the most … all those things you’re supposed to do once you finally escape the bubble of home: the alcohol, the drugs, and the exhausting career building in New York City in your 20s, struggling to find a worthy partner who won’t repeat the faults in your heritage.”

Somewhere amidst all these external happenings of her life, which also include disordered eating and emotional and sometimes physical abuse, Walsh makes her way towards a life that is finally the right fit for her. I found the explanation of her decision to exclusively pursue women as romantic and sexual partners fascinating. Indeed, for most of the book Walsh dates men, although there are hints of her Sapphic inclinations throughout. The prologue actually disguises the gender of the person she has a crush on, who is attending a dinner at Walsh’s house while her husband is away at work. I bet there were some straight people who picked up this book who were surprised to find out how much queer content was in it. Anyway, I always appreciate hearing stories about women’s sexual identity that have a different narrative other than I’ve-known-since-I-was-five-and-have-always-been-100%-lesbian. I think it’s really important to talk about the grey areas and actual queer women’s experiences. Too often women coming out don’t feel that their experiences are reflected in cultural narratives of queerness (this happens, I think, because gay men’s experiences dominate these narratives) and then they feel somehow ‘inauthentically’ lesbian or queer. I know I did. Anyway, this is Walsh’s description of her sexuality (fittingly, she uses a really effective food metaphor):

“I loved sex with women way more than sex with men. It wasn’t a stretch, or stressful, or a chore, or a performance … That’s not to say that I looked back and saw my sexual history with men as a disappointment. I pursued, wooed, loved, and savoured men. I just didn’t realize how much more there was to enjoy. If you spend your whole life eating pork chops and applesauce with sauerkraut, you have no idea how much you prefer pork served with a mole of cacao nibs, six kinds of chilies, cinnamon, anise, cloves, coriander, ground almonds, pumpkin seeds, and garlic … until you try it. I still found men attractive. But all I wanted from even the most compelling man I saw was a really good hug. The last man I had a crush on before I met Celine was Greek; he hailed from Lesbos. I was on a track, all right.”

There’s a lot to love and savor in Licking the Spoon. It’s the kind of honest, compelling memoir that makes you realize that most so-called ordinary peoples’ lives are actually quite extraordinary. It’s a book that also makes you think that your very own life might be worthy of a memoir as well.

Anna M. reviews Deep Deception by Cathy Pegau

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Danika Ellis

Deep Deception is the third book in Cathy Pegau’s science fiction/romance series set on the chilly mining colony of Nevarro, after Rulebreaker and Caught in Amber. The latter features a m/f couple, and the former, which I reviewed here at the Lesbrary, was one of my favorite books of 2011. Deep Deception is scheduled for release at the end of this month, and it may be my favorite of the series so far. I stayed up very late to finish it, at any rate!

Readers of Caught in Amber will recognize the mysterious Genevieve Caine as the right-hand woman of the menacing drug dealer who was the target of Nathan Sterling and Sasha James’s operation. Since that time, Genevieve has moved on and is working hard to avoid notice by the sinister Reyes corporation until she can leave Nevarro far behind. Unable to reach Sterling, she targets his colleague Natalia Hallowell as a likely candidate to help her uncover whatever wrongdoing the Reyes family is hiding in a distant mining town. Unfortunately, their introduction sows both the seeds of deep attraction and mistrust, as Genevieve seduces and then sedates Natalia in order to state her case.

Despite being tricked by Genevieve during their initial encounter, Natalia is no fool. She’s an experienced agent with the Colonial Mining Authority, and accustomed to operating in deep cover. She’s also on probation and not unwilling to investigate Genevieve’s claims, especially if it will occupy her mind. As the women travel together to probe the mystery in the mines, they struggle to trust each other without giving too many of their closely guarded secrets away–or their hearts. For Natalia, returning to the mines means bringing up memories from her painful past. For Genevieve, the stakes are higher than she will ever willingly confess, even to someone she is falling for.

I really enjoy the way Pegau has created the atmosphere of Nevarro throughout the series, especially the mining details that she provides in this third installment. The chemistry between Genevieve and Natalia is palpable, and I appreciated that their relationship had some time and reason to mature. The return of characters from Caught in Amber was also a nice touch, giving even more continuity to this romance series that so far has included both straight and lesbian couples. Why on earth can’t more series do that?