Second Quarter, 1996

April Smith's North of Montana

Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q2 1996)

Carol Guess' Seeing Dell

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q2 1996)

Djura's The Veil of Silence

Reviewed by Elliott (Q2 1996)

Helen Humphreys' The Perils of Geography

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q2 1996)

Jane Smiley's Barn Blind

Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q2 1996)

Janet Mason's When I Was Straight: Poems

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q2 1996)

Judith Hillman Patterson's Sweet Mystery: A Book of Remembering

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q2 1996)

Julia Penelope's Crossword Puzzles for Women

Reviewed by Elliott (Q2 1996)

Lierre Keith's Conditions of War (F)

Reviewed by Elliott (Q2 1996)

Lierre Keith's Skyler Gabriel (F)

Reviewed by Elliott (Q2 1996)

Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (F)

Reviewed by Terre Poppe (Q2 1996)

Mary A. Bufwack's Finding Her Voice:

The Saga of Women in Country Music (NF)

Reviewed by Elliott (Q2 1996)

Miriam Hope's Meeting the "IS" (P)

Reviewed by E. Daniels (Q2 1996)

Ntozake Shange's Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo (F)

Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q2 1996)

Ruthann Robson's Another Mother (F)

Reviewed by Elliott (Q2 1996)

Shauna Singh Baldwin's English Lessons and Other Stories (F)

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q2 1996)

Vanna Bonta's Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel (F)

Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q2 1996)

Various Author's Great Summer Reads

Reviewed by Elliott (Q2 1996)

Babette Cole's Princess Smartypants (F)

Reviewed by Elliott (Q2 1996)

Debra Riggin Waugh's Ex-Lover Weird Shit:

Short Fiction, Poetry, and Cartoons by Lesbians and Gay Men (F)

Reviewed by Elliott (Q2 1996)

The Guerrilla Girls' Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls (NF)

Reviewed by Elliott (Q2 1996)

Susan Johnson's When Women Played Hardball (NF)

Reviewed by Elliott (Q2 1996)

You can find the books reviewed here at one of the many women's bookstores listed in the Feminist Bookstore Index. The links indicated here point to text-only versions of the index for the convenience of women with slow modem connections but a prettier Netscape-enhanced version is just a hotlink away.

Feminist Bookstores in Canada and the USA:

http://www.igc.apc.org/women/bookstores/

Feminist Bookstores in Europe, Asia, South America, Australia & New Zealand:

http://www.igc.apc.org/women/bookstores/widehtml.html

She looks a little like Loretta Young, from her picture on the back flap, with her 1940's do, and her high cheekbones. Reminds me of an old picture of my mother dating from that era. But she writes a little like Raymond Chandler, as she leads us around the messy life of tough-gal Los Angeles FBI agent Ana Grey.

Grey is young, very young, and she makes mistakes because she won't ask for help, and she can't admit that she might not be tough enough to arrest bank robbers without backup. Well, it turns out that she can arrest the bad guys all by herself, but her boss isn't about to be impressed, no matter what she does. And her closest relative, her ex-policeman grandfather, isn't about to be impressed, either, no matter what Ana does in the love and the career departments.

And then Ana is assigned a case involving an aging Hollywood movie star, a wealthy orthopedic doctor, drugs, sex, and strangely enough, her own past. And Ana begins to grow up, little by little, pain by pain, memory by memory, and the next time guns are going off, she calls for back-up.

This is a first mystery by April Smith. I hope she writes more about Ana Gray. I hope we get to see her mature. This book gave me the feeling that it was the first one in a series. I hope so. Copyright © 1996 Lee Lawton
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Like many people, the first book by Jane Smiley I read was A Thousand Acres, which deservedly received many accolades of the business, as well as being discussed in every book discussion group across the country. Since I am beginning a new venture in life, I thought that I would go back and read the first novels of a couple of writers, Jane Smiley being one.

Now that I've read this novel, I am just a little disconcerted. I read a lot of book reviews, and I've read lots of book reviews for years. I read The New York Times Review, Belle Lettres, Women's Review, Hungry Mind Review, and a few others, along with reviews published in The Nation, and several other magazines. The reason I'm disconcerted is that even while reading all those reviews, at least since 1980, I don't remember ever reading a review of any of Smiley's books, until A Thousand Acres became known in practically every household in America.

How can this be? How can it be that a woman who writes with the sensitivity, the perceptiveness, the ache that Jane Smiley does, was ignored for over a decade? Or did I somehow just miss it? Now, I'll never know, but I do know that I'll be going back and finding every book this woman has ever had published.

Barn Blind is Smiley's first novel, and I found it to be as excellent as A Thousand Acres. The terrain is familiar, even though this novel takes place in Illinois, not Iowa. The Karlson's are a horse breeding/showing family. Husband, wife, four kids, too many horses, too much work, and did somebody say something about intimacy? These people are so finely drawn, so individual, that you will feel like you've just spent a lifetime or two at their home by the time you reach the shocking end. Even the horses become old friends. And just what is that on your shoes? Heh, heh.

Like my old writing teacher said, @quot;Introduce your characters by their acts, not by describing them.@quot; And she probably said something about placing individual lives in a framework of universal values and conflicts. Jane gets an A from me, and from my old writing teacher. Copyright © 1996 Lee Lawton
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Never before have I smiled so much while reading a memoir. As a wide-eyed young lady in San Francisco, she befriended the people on the street. As a peaceful white-haired grandmother, she was arrested protesting nuclear weapons and the Trident submarine. All along the way, Miriam shows us a very unique prospective on the world, through her life and her poetry. She has fought injustice from within the welfare system. She founded the Ecumenical Hunger Program in Palo Alto, CA in 1975. She shows us how to make a difference in the world, without putting others down, without compromise. Now, as a member of the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Valdosta, GA, she continues to show us the way of Hope.

Read this book. Smile at the stories. Reflect on the poetry.

3965 Sportsman's Cove Rd., Lake Park GA 31636
ISBN 0-923687-21-1

Copyright © 1996 E. Daniels
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Mothering, Daughtering, Work, Identity

Ask Ruthann Robson what kind of fiction she likes to read, and she'll tell you, @quot;stories about Lesbians.@quot; . I'd wager that most everyone reading this review would say the same thing. The difference between most of us and Ruthann is that she also writes some of the best of this kind of fiction.

Ruthann's lesbians, in her short stories and here in her new novel, are the most real fictional lesbians I know. These dykes go to work at jobs I recognize, they go to meetings, they struggle to change themselves, change the world, or at least to hold on to whatever place they have in it. They do things I think are good, and things I think are not so good. This surprises neither me nor them.

The lesbian at the center of Another Mother is exactly the kind of lesbian character I've come to expect from Ruthann. Angie @quot;[invented] herself from scraps of counterculture: mimeographed gay liberation, pamphlet feminism, and the swaggering but desperate phrases of a Mick Jagger ballad.@quot;

Now a lawyer at a small non-profit law firm where half of the battles she fights are about office politics and funding, Angie is a dyke caught in her life, in choices she has made and not made, or has not known to be choices. As Another Mother unfolds, Angie is caught between her past, marked by flashbacks and habits and unrecognized desires, and her future, marked in calendars full of deadlines and in her beloved catalogs, whose products promise to deliver not only beauty but stability. Angie is someone's committed lover, the relationship which is @quot;supposed to@quot; define a novel as Lesbian, and she is someone's mother, which has recently become a theme in Lesbian writing. But Angie's most significant relationships go beyond the usual framework for lesbian novels-- she is also someone's daughter, co-worker, boss, lover, of the past and secret varieties, friend. The @quot;character@quot; with whom Angie interacts most often is her daily appointment calendar, which she calls simply @quot;my Book;@quot; Angie suspects she loves her Book's worn, warm leather cover the way other dykes love their leather jackets.

The relationship I value most in Another Mother is Angie's political relationship to this world we live in, a world she describes in despair for a client as @quot;a world that likes its dykes best when they are dead [...] that likes its mothers best when they are lost.@quot; Ruthann expresses -- I'd say casually, but that would belittle her work and talent -- in brief moments of Angie's thoughts or conversations, a deep understanding of the world, a deep feminist, dykely understanding. The whole complexity of class and race and gender and sexuality underlie even the smallest events in Ruthann's stories; she can convey more about women confronting race and sexuality in a scene than in long didactic speeches or even entire essays or novels by other writers. At an agency picnic, for example, Angie, as the resident Lesbian, and Ellen, as the resident Black woman, confront the racism and heterosexism of two male co-workers, and of the agency itself. Roger, a co-worker, tells Angie that she is up for a promotion, which Ellen could also have gotten, but didn't, because the agency isn't @quot;ready for a Black woman in that position:@quot;

Ellen is silent.
@quot;And everyone is ready for a dyke?@quot; Angie asks.
@quot;No one can tell what you are. You look regular.@quot;
@quot;Meaning white? Or meaning not like a dyke? Or both?@quot;
@quot;Meaning these days every professional woman looks like a lesbian. Don't be so sanctimonious. You're taking this the wrong way, Ange.@quot;
@quot;How many times do I have to tell you, Rog, not to call me Ange?@quot;
@quot;Let's get out of here, Walter,@quot; Roger says, @quot;these women are driving me crazy.@quot;
Left alone, Ellen and Angie each wait for the other to speak.
One of them says she is sorry, and the other says she is sorry, too.
@quot;And what a sorry organization this is,@quot; one of them laughs.
@quot;And what a sorry world,@quot; the other adds. And even though they both laugh again, each of them thinks about her clients.

@quot;So, yes, skillful,@quot; you say, @quot;but I thought the novel would be about mothers.@quot; @quot;Yes,@quot; Angie would answer, @quot;and you think motherhood isn't about class and race and sexual identity?@quot; Another Mother is about mothers' identities, about the label Mother itself. It's about Angie, about the lesbian mothers she defends, not just mothers fighting for custody, but lesbian mothers accused of killing their children, and about the mothers of the accused lesbians. About Angie's mother, Claire, and Angie's daughter, Skye, and her co-mother Rachel and the complexity of mothering and daughtering. About Angie's life during a crisis she can't quite grasp or understand or see her way out from. About dreams. About class. About growing up poor and becoming a lawyer not for the money but for Justice. About Angie knowing her past but not always knowing what it means or how it connects to her present. (Sometimes, reading Angie's stories from her childhood, and watching her now, I want to grab her, like I would a best friend, and yell, @quot;Hello. Listen to yourself, now look at this, don't you get it?@quot; And she doesn't always, making her feel more like me and my friends than I'm always comfortable feeling).

Another Mother is also about how the book feels. The story covers, in the present, a calendar year, and is arranged by months. These months, seen both in her life and her flashbacks, carry us into Angie's world, in which she uses calendars to guard against @quot;the nasty surprises of the past.@quot; Angie is often frustrated and confused by time, and I felt this as a reader, wanting to move ahead into what will happen but trapped, by the structure, by the richness, in what has happened. Nothing flows easily for Angie; water, rivers, especially, in the novel represent not movement but barriers to movement. Angie struggles with connecting time and place and people; bridges -- physical, great, metal bridges -- stand between Angie and home, Angie and work, Angie and her daughter, her lover, her mother, her clients. Angie's dislike of bridges is so strong that even Skye recognizes her dis-ease, announcing to Rachel that Angie doesn't like bridges @quot;because they connect things.@quot; Angie, because of her mother Claire's depressions, was in many ways a mother from a young age, and now struggles with her roles as a mother and daughter; the novel opens with a phone call from Claire to Angie in which Claire's voice is described as childish, a conversation that is emotionally brutal and ends with Angie's wish for another mother. Another kind of mother, which we watch her try to be, and another kind of daughter, a daughter like Skye, a daughter who could admit she was scared, lonely, confused.

And Another Mother has passages which, in the midst of the seriousness and struggling, are surprising and delightful: the sex scenes between Angie and Rachel, full of want and love and a sense of moving into a different kind of world; the sex scene between Angie and twelve other women in celebration of summer solstice (Surprised by this side of Angie? So was I). The humor, humor everywhere, humor in unexpected places. Some of the funniest passages involve Angie and her co-worker Roger, a Sensitive Guy, who talked of his @quot;inner woman@quot; until Angie gave her a name, Octavia. Angie interacts with Octavia, sends her memos, sometimes refuses to talk to Roger until he lets Octavia out. Or the time Roger tries to come on to Angie, saying he knows that lesbians no longer have to refuse a relationship just because someone is a man and Angie mocks him by taunting @quot;You've been reading The Village Voice again.@quot; I laughed the hardest, a subversive laugh, always my favorite, when Angie, in order to get better treatment for Claire, glared down a doctor and lied outright, claiming to be a malpractice attorney. And then there are the moments of connection, of tenderness, between Angie, Rachel and Sky. After one of Angie's clients has hung herself in jail, Angie goes home and breaks down. Skye calls Rachel home from work: @quot;Rachel and Skye put Angie to bed. And both of them rock her and smooth her forehead, as if she is a child who is not too old to be rocked. And they are perfect mothers.@quot;

I'm not saying that Another Mother is a novel you'll want to read. I'm saying it is a novel you'll want to re-read. And in a world where there isn't enough time to get through most books even once, this is the best thing I can say.

Copyright © 1996 Elliott
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

A CORNFIELD COUNTY SAAAAAAAAAAL-LUTE!

So, four or five years ago I was writing an essay about the word @quot;Redneck@quot; for the Lesbian Ethics class issue. I started with cool linguistic commentary, but by 3/4 way into the essay I was in a fine rant about the completely uninformed yet cocksure opinions of many middle and upperclass women about the lives and cultures of workingclass and poor women. In the section @quot;I Hate Nice@quot; I landed on the topic of Country music and wrote:

...the thing that has made me most angry this week, is when wimmin who don't even know who Tammy Wynette is spit out sentences with these key phrases @quot;...country-western music...stand by your man...redneck...@quot; Let me say this now, before I meet you outside of this room and feel like screaming at you. Country Music is not simplistic, and it is not a joke. There are plenty of @quot;that broad is mine@quot; songs and @quot;give everything to your man@quot; songs (which are, I'm sure, much more dangerous to wimmin than the way opera, theatre and musicals romanticize rape and battering); there are also wimmin's love songs to their mothers, grandmothers, sisters and daughters which celebrate and teach strength, resistance, self-love and, of course, how to screw the system.

When I wrote this, I really wanted an essay or an article or a book I could quote, something I could hand to women and say @quot;Read this and get a clue.@quot; But there was nothing to cite, nothing to hand over, nothing about Country women as women.

But now there is, and it's good. Finding Her Voice is the book I've been waiting years for -- a reciting of more information about women in Country Music than anyone could ever remember and a Feminist analysis of the information. At 594 pages it's a hefty book, which makes me really happy when I dream about chucking it at women who are offensively classist one minute and screaming (mispronounced, of course) @quot;Yee Haw@quot; at line dancing lessons the next.

Co-authors Mary Bufwack and Robert Oermann, a wife/husband team, are the perfect pair for this job. He is a Nashville insider with a syndicated column and a weekly radio show, and he works as a radio programmer, a TV consultant, and a writer of scripts including the 1993 TV special @quot;The Women of Country.@quot; She was the cofounder of the Women's Studies program at Colgate University, the first coordinator of Nashville's Shelter and Domestic Violence Program, and currently works as the director of Nashville's United Neighborhood Health Services and as a journalist and reviewer. Finding Her Voice is a blend of their areas of expertise -- tons of biographical, historical and insider information about Country's women placed within a context of social and political analysis.

@quot;The story of women in country music is a window into the world of the majority of American women,@quot; the authors write in the introduction. @quot;There is humor as well as sadness here, victory as well as heartache. The history of women's country music reveals a rich vein of positive images, selfassertive lyrics, and strong female performers.@quot; In Finding Her Voice Mary Bufwack (ok, let's be honest, I love the name Bufwack. It's perfect for this book) and Robert Oermann trace the entire history of the humor, heartbreak and resistance, from Country Music's origins in the early nineteenth century, when most women performed as part of Family and gospel groups -- the only @quot;proper@quot; avenues for women to be on stage -- to 1993 and out-Lesbian dynamo k.d. lang. Along the way there are exhaustive discussions of women in early @quot;country bumpkin/rube@quot; comedy, women in Country Music radio, Country women in Hollywood, Country gospel, the Rebellious Girls of Honky-Tonk and Rockabilly, the folk revival, and the huge changes that happened in the 70s and 80s when women like Dolly Parton and Barbara Mandrell broke stereotypes and ground for women in Country music by being both talented entertainers and talented businesswomen.

Or perhaps I should call the discussions exhausting. There is a huge amount of information in this book, more than anyone could take in at a single reading. After one read-through, I have a great general sense of the history of Country women, and a lot of fun trivia. I'll be keeping the book handy, though, so I can always go back to certain chapters to find information. The format of the book aids this process by having a great index, lots of photos, and wonderfully laid out tables with basic information highlighted. The authors also have good discussions of Country's @quot;invisible@quot; women -- the musicians, songwriters, engineers and producers.

What I really loved about Finding Her Voice is the affirmation it gives to the culture I grew up in. Before the current popularity of line dancing, most of my peers had always ridiculed Country music. In college, I had to wait for my friends to be away from the dorm to play my Waylon, Willie, and Emmylou albums because the sarcasm was so cruel and at the time I had no analysis of classism to encourage me to resist and be proud. Around dykes (especially in the northern Midwest and Northeast), I always had to put up with garbage about how Country Music was so conservative and backlash. In Finding Her Voice, I finally have the facts to back up what I've always known in my gut about Country women and Country Music -- that the woman-loving is just as real and prevalent as the misogyny.

The two chapters that examine Feminism and anti-Feminism in the lives and music of Country women are the real heart of the book for me. The authors have done a great job here of explaining both trends in Country music by really delving into the well of Country's traditional source of cultural values -- white, rural, working class lives. The anti-Feminism, patriotic, religious values expressed in many women's lyrics make more @quot;sense@quot; to Feminist sensibilities when you understand to extent to which the Feminist movement was identified with the distorted images of the mainstream media -- professional women from big cities, especially New York, who had nothing to do but protest. If you know the bigoted views Northern/urban women hold about Country Music fans and performers, it's not so surprising that these fans and performers didn't trust the Feminism they saw in the media, and understood it as somewhat irrelevant to their lives. In the words of Loretta Lynn's popular song about an overwhelmed mother, @quot;One's On the Way:@quot;

The girls in New York City
they all march for Women's Lib
and Better Homes and Gardens shows
the modern way to live
and the pill may change the world tomorrow
but meanwhile, today --
Here in Topeka the flies are a buzzin'
the dog is a barkin', the floor needs a scrubbin'
one needs a spankin' and one needs a huggin'
and one's on the way

Some Country women called themselves Feminist anyway, and others who didn't went right on confronting and smashing sexism in the Country Music industry.

I think these two chapters -- @quot;Loretta Lynn and Working-Class Pride@quot; and @quot;Tammy Wynette and Traditional Values@quot; -- should become standard reading in Women's Studies courses. They'd be a great way to get at issues of classism and resistance in Feminism. But wouldn't that be the day, when academia would take Country Music seriously. After all -- Madonna is Art, but Dolly Parton is just a woman who wears tight clothes, too much make-up and funny hairstyles, right?

@quot;I was singing...because we were poor. You spell that with four o's, p-o-o-o-o-r. We knew what it was like to be hungry.@quot; Brenda Lee

This book's discussion of class and classism, and how it interacts with sexism, was a wonderful surprise for me. I mean, it should be impossible to talk about Country Music without talking about class, but then again it should be impossible to talk about women without talking about class and that happens all of the time. The history of women in Country Music is very much the history of white working-class women in the U.S. After all, those songs about lovers killed in mining accidents are real, and about mothers and families struggling to provide for their children, are not just something from songwriting contests.

Finding Her Voice tastes and smells and sounds like every Saturday night of my childhood -- Geno's pizza-mix pizza with ham, potato chips, coke, and the institution known as Hee Haw. My whole hometown tuned in the night Hee Haw saluted the dying little town of Roher, Illinois, whose population of 1 was my great-great Aunt Bessie. All the people I knew came from towns like Roher: Pisgah (pronounced Piz-gee), New Berlin (that's BUR-lin), Virden (VUR-dn), or from places where there weren't even towns but townships with a tiny township hall stuck in the corner of a field by a convenient county road intersection. In my childhood world, no real people came from Brooklyn or the Bronx or L.A., even though everyone on TV and in the movies and in pop music did. Finding Her Voice traces women from towns like the ones I knew, a litany of the sticks, the backwater towns, the hillbilly, the redneck, the white trash homelands: Chubbuck, Idaho; Hazel, Kentucky; Butcher Hollow, Tennessee; Tater Ride, Tennessee; Lamb, Kentucky; Pinch-em-Tight Holler, Kentucky; Poor Valley, Virginia. These towns, this culture, are beautifully celebrated in Finding Her Voice. So a big old Cornfield County SAAAAAAAAL-LUTE!!!! to Mary Bufwack and Robert Oermann for documenting and lovingly explaining these women, their lives, and their power.

Country Music Quiz

Ok, so you can two-step to kd and line dance to Mary Chapin-Carpenter. And you've got the jeans, and the boots (even though you don't work in them so they don't have that little worn place on the heel that makes rocking back so easy), and maybe you've even got the glowing-white poly/cotton shirt with the piping and inset yoke and mother of pearl snaps and maybe even fringe. But what do you know about the history and culture of women in country music? Here's a little Country quiz. (answers are below)

1. Which Carter women were in the original Carter Family, the founding family of Country Music?

2. Comedian and musician Cousin Emmy taught Country Music-Hall-of-Famer Grandpa Jones to play what instrument?

3. Who became the Queen of Honky Tonk with 1952's hit @quot;It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels@quot;?

4. What Rockabilly singer, who broke into professional singing at age 10 in 1956, and whose @quot;Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree@quot; still gets airplay, has been cited as a major influence by Dolly Parton, Cyndi Lauper, Stevie Nicks, Barbara Mandrell and kd lang?

5. She is to Grinder's Switch, Tennessee what Garrison Keillor is to Lake Woebegone.

6. What singer/songwriter is best known outside of Country circles for the 1973 Coca-Cola commercial hit @quot;Country Sunshine@quot;?

7. She was country was country wasn't cool, and can play every instrument on stage to prove it.

8. When you're lookin' at her, you're lookin' at a Country woman who recorded a great song in honor of the birth control pill.

9. This singer/songwriter/ banjo-picker/ actress/ major donor to AIDS funds first hit nation-wide fame singing with Porter Wagoner.

10. When Johnny Cash married into the legacy of the Carter Family, these two women, now both well-known performers in their own right, became step-sisters. ____ Carter and ____ Cash

11. kd lang went to Nashville to work with producer Owen Bradley because he had originally created the lush arrangements known as @quot;The Nashville Sound@quot; with...

12. Singer Christina Claire Ciminella, who fused the sounds of her idols Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt into an award-winning Country sound, is better known as ____.

Answers:

1. Sara and Maybelle

2. The banjo

3. Kitty Wells

4. Brenda Lee

5. Minnie Pearl

6. Dottie West

7. Barbara Mandrell

8. Loretta Lynn

9. Dolly Parton

10. Carlene Carter and Roseanne Cash

11. Patsy Cline

12. Wynona Judd

Copyright © 1996 Elliott
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

In her second novel (the first was _Mean Spirit_, one of my top 10 favorite books ever, and this is joining that grouping), Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist Linda Hogan tells us a story of five generations of Native American women in the Boundary Waters between Canada and Minnesota. Though set in contemporary times with a story of national government raping and destroying the ancestral homelands of the Fat Eaters (the Beautiful People) and the stands taken against this destruction by the peoples, this is also a story of ancient times, of the grandmothers remembering and telling the stories from the past, teaching the younger ones. It is a story of dislocation and of finding oneself, of love and endurance, of magic and old mysteries, of hatred and greed. The story is told primarily through the eyes of the young woman named Angel, who was taken away from her people and her home as a very young child, and who has just found them at the age of 15 (at the beginning of the novel). Hogan's storytelling is so good that I spent hours in the places she constructed, smelling the forest and the animals and the homes she described, hearing the women, and the men, talking with each other and with the world around them.

Barbara Kingsolver's note on the back cover speaks for me, too: "Solar Storms is a novel that instructs the heart as it binds its curative spell. With her unparalled gifts for truth and magic, Linda Hogan reinforces my faith in reading, writing, living."

Immerse yourself in this book. I don't think you'll regret it at all. I highly recommend it. Copyright © 1996 Terre Poppe
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Getting Feminism Across -- And Down

Will You Like This Book? A Quiz:

1. Call Off Your Old ____ Ethics (Bumper Crop, p. 6)
2. _____ Back the _______! (Bumper Crop, p. 6)
3. Audre ______ (Second Wave, p. 12)
4. ______ Lerner, women's historian (Second Wave, p. 12)
5. ____ Bolt (Rubyfruit Jungle) (Name Game, p. 15)
6. Shadow __ __ Dime (Glamour of Grammar, p. 23)
7. The ______ Man (Joanna Russ) (In Her Own Write, p. 28)
8. Parthenogenic reptiles (Like Mothers, Like Daughters, p. 44)
9. _____ Majora or Minora (Our Bodies, Ourselves, p. 48)
10. The ______ __ the _______ (Hotwire, p. 54)

(answers below)

Are you a Feminist with a Trivial mind, or even a Feminist cruciverbalist? After years of bandying Feminist lingo, are you ready to do something fun with it? Here is your desire fulfilled -- linguist Julia Penelope's Crossword Puzzles for Women. Julia has created sixty puzzles which spring from a Feminist view of the world, including a Feminist sense of humor (clue "men have a big one " -- answer, "ego").

Julia's puzzles are arranged with themes that reflect women's worlds, literature, history and entertainment: The Second Wave (70's Feminists); Our Mother's Gardens (plants); Herland (women's utopias); The Craft (wicca); Our Bodies, Ourselves; Hotwire (Women's Music); Ecofeminism; Crone-ology (Mary Daly -- for the serious puzzler!). Here, at last, knowing that Ti-Grace Atkinson published Amazon Odyssey in 1974 through Links press would get you somewhere!

Like all crossword collections, Julia has some words which are used repeatedly throughout the puzzles. Unlike traditional collections, however, where the words are obscure four letter spellings of anglosaxon farming terms, Julia's favorite four-letter filler word seems to be Tret (as in Fure, of course!). Working my way through the book, I found even my bibliography brain to the test: the puzzles range in difficulty from common-knowledge topics, for me, anyway, such as @quot;Bumper Crop@quot; (bumpersticker slogans) to @quot;Companion Lovers,@quot; for which a very clear memory of Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig's Lesbian Peoples: Materials for a Dictionary would be more than helpful. When you get stuck, the answers are in the back of the book, but using them is like trying to enjoy the last Dove bar that you know your girlfriend asked you to save for her....

I am really enjoying this book. Try it for yourself, and you will too. And get a copy for a funny, Feminist, or linguistically limber friend. Or, what the heck, get several copies and a pen for a compulsive, funny, Feminist friend, one who would have no greater joy than fitting perfectly printed letters into the beckoning blank boxes....

(answers: 1. Tired; 2. Take, Night; 3. Lorde; 4. Gerda; 5. Molly; 6. On A; 7. Female; 8. Lizards; 9. Labia; 10. Changer and, Changed)

Copyright © 1996 Elliott
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

When I started working as a book reviewer, I began to realize that I read for many different reasons. Sometimes I read for the fantasy, to relax and get away. Other times, and this is where Lierre Keith's novels come in, I read for the reality -- to understand myself and my world more deeply, to examine through different views what it means to be a lesbian, a feminist, an activist. Many times, and this, too is where Lierre's books come in, these forays into heightened realities of fiction are not easy rides, although they are always worth the bumps.

Conditions of War is a story about a group of friends, lovers, and housemates who together form an underground political action group confronting violence against women. X, the main character (it's childhood nickname), a dyke in her 20's, struggles with her lover Andrea and their tightknit group of friends to understand what is happening around them. In the world, the dykes are going to the trials of murders and rapists to speak out as the voices of Murdered Women. In their friendships and relationships, the dykes are learning to deal with the complexity of their lives -- the effects of violence and poverty, disability and ablism, and what to do when one good lesbian friend batters her lover. The novel, a coming-of-age story for feminist activists, and has its sweet and funny and loving sides as well.

Here's the ending -- the group has just left a courthouse after a brilliant bit of Feminist theatre:

"Then we were really shrieking, scuttling down the street with the leaves, looking over our shoulders in mock fear, laughing like it could all be ours. We would be fine. One way or another, together or more likely alone, we'd all get through. I slipped my arm around Marnie's waist and headed for home."

How did X and the group get from complexity and violence to this point? You'll have to read the book yourself, of course, but one hint -- they got there through some fine writing!

Lierre's new novel, Skyler Gabriel, is much more lighthearted -- if you can use @quot;lighthearted@quot; to describe a murder mystery.

Here, our hero and sleuth is Skyler, the bass player in a band called Minor Disturbances. Skyler lives in the Jamaica Plain area of Boston, with an odd but loving assortment of lesbian friends, including Judith, a dyke who lives on women's land and for whom Skyler is carrying a large torch.

Trying to get cash from a bank machine on the way home from a gig, Skyler witnesses a woman being harassed and threatened by a man who seems to be threatening the woman's daughter. The next afternoon, Skyler sees a picture of the woman in the paper -- she is dead, a suspected suicide, and her daughter is gone.

From there, Skyler is drawn, as our heros are always in mysteries, into an ominous web of evil men with weapons, shadowy figures, women who give hints even though it puts them into danger, organized hate groups, and loyal friends who will, at the smallest suggestion, help break into law offices or borrow cars to drive to far away places late at night. This is a great Lesbian Mystery tradition, heralding back to every time Bess and George came to Nancy Drew's rescue. Along the way, Skyler confronts the pain of her relationship with her own mother, the complexities of Judith's life, and, in Skyler own words, suicide by collective process.

From deeply feminist understandings of pornography and violence to capturing the joys of lesbians living and acting together, Lierre Keith writes stories, characters and vibrant and often startling images that reflect my own dyke life back to me in ways that make me reconsider what I thought I knew. I always read Lierre's book with a pen in hand, underlining wildly, marking the choice bits so I can find them time and time again!

Copyright © 1996 Elliott
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

In the four years I've lived in Philadelphia, I've found three ways to cope with those weeks in late July and early August when the only thing higher than the temperature is the humidity: get access to a pool, go back home to Minnesota, or curl up in an air-conditioned library or bookstore and read. This summer, reading is the only economic option for me, after the pool has been lost in a grand drama of out-law (that's Lesbian for in-law) divorce and my favorite Minnesotan is coming out here. Oh well -- break my heart, force me to spend hours with good books.

If you're in a similar no pool, no vacation to the northland summer, get thee to a good bookstore (preferably one with comfy furniture) and pick up some of these books. All of them are in paperback, so they'll carry well to the beach or pool, too.

Ex-Lover Weird Shit: A Collection of Short Fiction, Poetry and Cartoons by Lesbians and Gay Men (edited by Debra Riggin Waugh, Two Out of Three Sisters Press) is, well, exactly what is says. Many of the writers will be familiar names -- Jewelle Gomez, Andrea Natalie, Ron Romanovsky, Judith McDaniel, Janet Mason, Jennifer Camper, and Leslea Newman. Some of the pieces are sad, heartbroken, angry and lonely. Many of them are funny -- laugh out loud funny (actually, the title alone is worth the cover price). Editor Debra Wiggin put this anthology together for three reasons:

"First, there's not a hell of a lot of humor out there for gays and lesbians. Second, few books include work by both lesbians and gay men (And who, I thought, can trash an ex-lover better than a gay man?) Third, ex-lover weird shit is universal: we're all somebody's ex-lover, and it's not pretty getting there."

When she couldn't find a publisher (the only one who wanted it didn't want "shit " in the title) she published it herself. Which costs a lot of money, of course, so get out and buy a copy for yourself and maybe even one or two or five for you-know-who.

If, after your adventure in ex-lover land, you find you like laughing and want more, pick up Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls (The Guerrilla Girls, Harper Perennial,1995) If you know who the Guerrilla Girls are, knowing the book is out should get you to the bookstore. If you don't know, get it anyway, you'll love it. The Girls, a group of women artists, activists and supporters in New York City, challenged and changed the art world in 1985 when they began plastering the city with posters calling museums, galleries, art critics and artists to account for the vast under-representation of women artists and all artists of color. When the art world wanted to know who had created the poster, the Guerrilla Girls began their public appearances, dressed in black and wearing gorilla masks. This collection, which has wonderful graphics and illustrations on every page, contains all of their classic work, including their report card poster, wherein all of the galleries are failing, the infamous @quot;The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist@quot; flyer (working without pressure of success, having an escape from the art world in your 4 free-lance jobs, not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called a genius, etc), and my favorite, the Guerrilla Girls' Pop Quiz -- @quot;If February is Black History Month and March is Women's History Month, what happens the rest of the year? Discrimination.@quot; The collection also has postcards for you to use yourself, and posters the Girls have done about homelessness, abortion and the Gulf War. And, there is a great long interview with some of the individual Guerrillas (for speaking engagements, each woman takes the name of a woman artist), to give you a real taste of these women's thoughts, process and humor. My favorite part -- the Girls are asked @quot;Do you allow men to join?@quot; and Frida Kahlo answers, @quot;We'd love to be inclusive, but it's not easy to find men willing to work without getting paid or getting credit for it.@quot;

For a great, quick read with wonderful illustrations, check out Princess Smartypants (Babette Cole, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1986), the story of a princess who is a Ms. And does not want to be a Mrs. She takes on and outsmarts all of the princes, except for the last one. For Prince Swashbuckle, drastic measures are needed, but out heroine rises to the occasion. You'll love it -- there is nothing, and I mean nothing, better for a hot day than an afternoon in the children's section of any library or bookstore. And here's a hint -- if you don't have kids and are afraid you'll be spotted as getting these books for yourself, smear some koolaid on your cheek and pin a wilted dandelion to your shirt. Sure, it's a stereotype, but isn't that what passing is all about?

If you'd like to be playing baseball but can only muster the energy to think about it, get Susan Johnson's When Women Played Hardball (Seal Press, 1994). Johnson, who grew up in Rockford, Illinois as an avid fan of the Rockford Peaches, has put together a wonderful tribute to the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. The book is organized around the 1950 championship game between the Rockford Peaches and the Fort Wayne Daisies, with each chapter being devoted to one game. Within each chapter, Johnson has collected her own memories of the game, as well as reports from local newspapers and wonderful interviews with the players. When Women Played Hardball gives not only the history of the league, but a great sense of who the players were as individuals and what it felt like to be a girl watching these great women athletes in action.

Copyright © 1996 Elliott
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Loyal To Her Culture and Yet Rebelling...

@quot;I would be like Kahina: with my songs I would raise a veritable army, loyal to the cultural wealth of our countries and yet rebelling against the omnipotence of an outdated patriarchy.@quot;

Djura is an Algerian Berber singer, songwriter, and filmmaker. The Veil of Silence is her autobiography, the story of her own liberation and of the terrible violence inflicted by her family because she has refused to live as a traditional Berber woman. Throughout her life she has been dragged from country to country by her male relatives, imprisoned for months in rooms with no outside contact, severely beaten many times, had her face slashed in a knife attack, and been attacked and severely beaten while seven months pregnant.

She has also written beautiful and powerful music, led the musical group Djur Djura (named for a mountain near her home), made several important documentary films about her homeland and about the lives of Algerian immigrants in France, and campaigned ceaselessly both to preserve the beauty of her Berber culture and to change its abuse and control of women.

Djura's struggle to be both Berber and free is at the center of The Veil of Silence and of her music. Djura's attempts to reflect the beauty of her birth world while challenging some of its deepest traditions is the struggle of all Feminists from @quot;minority@quot; cultures -- African American women, white working and poverty class women, African women in Europe. Djura's story is particularly moving because the brutal and constant violence in her life is so connected to her attempts to document Berber culture.

When she first fled to Algeria from France with her brother and his French wife to escape the brutality of her father and pursue her acting career, she rediscovered the beauty in the music and language of the small town she had been born in, but was then imprisoned by her brother for five months for @quot;going too far.@quot; Years later, while she was in Algeria with her partner Oliver making a documentary on Berber architecture, her brother attacked them, dragging them from their car and stabbing both of them. (No one from the village responded to Djura's screams for help after her brother yelled the simple explanation @quot;She's my sister.@quot;) She lived in terror for years after her brother warned her as she fled the scene, bleeding, @quot;You hear? Wherever you are, wherever you go, even if it's to America, even if it takes ten years or more, I'll find you and kill you. @quot;

Djura struggled for years to keep her musical group Djur Djura together, because Algerian musicians refused to play for her subversive lyrics, and because the other singers kept quitting, partly under pressure from their families.

But Djura has prevailed over the years of violence and set backs, drawing both on her own immense personal strength and on models of women's strength from Berber culture and history, especially Kahina, a warrior queen who led an army of women to resist Arab invaders. She has also relied on the centuries of women's whispered resistance, adopting as Djur Djura's slogan:

@quot;We sing aloud what our mothers hummed under their breath.@quot;

Djura also draws strength from linking her battles to the battles of all women; her cultural work, including The Veil Of Silence, is always intended to give a voice to women who have been silenced and to bring about a change in attitudes in women and men. @quot;I'd attempt to drag all Algerian girls into my struggle,@quot; Djura writes, @quot;and those from all North Africa, the whole of Africa, girls and women from other Arab countries, and even some from the West whose light was still hidden under a bushel.@quot; I rarely use the phrase @quot;inspirational@quot; to describe books -- because most @quot;inspirational@quot; books inspire me to close them -- but Djura's story in The Veil of Silence moved me deeply, and gave me a rare and precious sense of connection to women's struggles around the globe.

Djur Djura's song Norah for a sixteen-year-old girl killed by her family

Norah, this letter I must write
Although it cannot reach your eyes
Where your buried body lies
But thanks to you, we now unite
To defend the future's youth
We never cease to hear your cries
Repeated still from mouth to mouth,

East to West, North to South
Your memory shall endure
By this our song kept evergreen
Killed by your brothers, just sixteen,
Hard as it is to tell this truth...

To justify their crime
They invoked the usual claim:
@quot;Ancestral law her death decreed
She went too far, she brought us shame.@quot;

What we fear does come to pass
You die for a word, an idea
You were a flower in its prime
Norah, of beauty pure
Victim of a wicked deed
And in your heart: the beauty of the world...

For you and our sisters we shall sing
Mountains we shall move
Our words will be sharp and cutting,
They will uphold our dignity
Which many seek to disprove
Truth is a clear refreshing spring.

Copyright © 1996 Elliott
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

@quot;Where there is a woman there is magic.@quot; With that sentence, this book about three daughters and their mother begins. This is a woman's book, through and through. There is magic, both practical and the kind that permeates good writing. There are recipes for dishes mama made, and for dishes to serve that special someone. There is the wisdom of matriarchs. There is love of family, love of your honey, love of work, love of the gifts we have, love of doing something and presenting it just so. There is the South. There is sex, the kind of sex that is full of smells, sighs, slowness, and sensuality. And it doesn't matter if the sex is with a man or with a woman, as long as it pleases. There is learning and growing and becoming yourself. Yup, a woman's book through and through!

This is Shange's first book, and is dedicated to @quot;all women in struggle.@quot; Black struggle, woman struggle, poverty struggle, becoming yourself struggle. All those things, and the gifts they bring us. The writing is rich, filled with magical realism. The book is a little uneven, as one daughter takes over from another, and we lose contact with the daughters we've already met. Toward the end, the magic becomes a little lost, and the story line dissolves into straight fiction, but all in all this is a lovely book.

Enjoy!

Copyright © 1996 Lee Lawton
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

This book of very lean and physical poetry is about distance, about getting lost and finding yourself in strange places, from

Up the backs of hills, higher
than the geometry of birds. ...

- from Climbing

to

... driving slow roads
north of the city. Roads
that remember the weight
of this truck, the shift
of our bodies in the cab.

Low hum of engine
opens the throat
of a summer night.

Ten years of this and never
this. Sliding down a hard shell
hill and suddenly the road
on fire.
...

- from Ambush

In each of these crystaline poems Helen Humphreys examines closely the maps that chart the ways people lose each other, themselves, half-starved and alone in the wide presence of the world.

...

No one waits for me.
No one needs you to rescue them.

Around us the darkness has stiffened
the trees into outlines, props
for a loose flap
of sheet metal sky.

- from Ambush

Sometimes distance looks like freedom, the road beckons like a lover, like the rush of speed, or drugs,

Distance is narcotic, ride it to
the brink of stupor. Grit in your teeth,
cramp in your throttle hand. Pebble shot
of bees and rough rasp wind. Take
the straight line through the corners.
...

- from Motorcycle Lesson

but all too often it looks up close like the empty maps that fail to span wide oceans, like the far journey we have yet alone to go, like a looming horizon we can't imagine seeing over.

After you left I stood
holding the screen door open,
listening for your car
long after it was through
the farm and gone.

- from When You Weren't With Me

If you love poetry, you'll need no further encouragement to seek out the work of this talented poet. If you don't, what can I possibly say?

Copyright © 1996 Lee Anne Phillips
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

What is truth? Truth can be the lies we tell ourselves and others about the important people and events in our lives. Carol Guess explores the truths of five inhabitants of a small Midwestern town in this luminous first novel. Her characters talk to themselves about Dell, a partial reflection seen only in a series of distorted mirrors, as they rationalize and justify their own lives.

This isn't Roshamon. There are no high crimes or misdemeanors played out before us, other than the ordinary posturing and petty betrayals of ordinary people trying hard not to look too closely at themselves. By fixing their collective gaze on Dell, an independent character seen variously as heterosexual, bisexual or lesbian, depending on who is looking, the characters manage to describe themselves much more clearly than they do Dell herself, who remains a shadowy figure hovering just out of reach, as remote and untouchable in memory as she seems to have been in life.

Dell drives a cab; it is the ideal occupation for her. In the temporary confines of a cab, one trusts one's destination to a stranger whose face you never really see, an odd sort of intimacy with carefully choreographed entrances and exits. She seems to have arranged her life in much the same way; even in her sexual relationships she holds something back, something ineffable and unattainable that lures like faint perfume in the dark, like beautiful eyes seen over the edge of a veil.

Her circle of admirers as well as her rivals have been carried along with her to the brink of something like the death that took Dell into a permanence she would never have allowed in life. They are all of them stuck, like flies in glue, in the various postures she left them in, trying but failing to move on. One hopes but doubts that they ever can.

How can we free ourselves except with honesty? an personal honesty conspicuously and sympathetically absent from the characters in this story. How can we escape pain except by sharing it? a task beyond the scope of all these ordinary people in an ordinary town. As Dell herself, the author's intentions are revealed in the white space between the lines, in the empty space where one can see, if one looks very closely, one's own face looking back.

Copyright © 1996 Lee Anne Phillips
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

From Tampons at Space to There We Were, these poems explore a landscape littered with the discarded detritus of life at the tail end of yet another century. She starts with the frankly male masturbatory image of phallic rocketships and then dives quickly into the womb, celebrating women, cunts, menstruation, and even the dangerous false intimacy of the bars.

While they're stroking
sleek new missiles
aimed at the last frontier,
we'll be perfecting
the weave, the fit
calculating the end of
spillage, thinking about
what the first man on the moon
didn't have to.

- from Tampons in Space

Empty whiskey bottles and tampon tubes are juxtaposed with images drawn from bar life, from walking hand in hand at the zoo, from squirming on a hard pew at the back of a transubstantiated church, in a brutal, hard-edged expose of life as it is lived rather than how we sometimes wish it were.

manyfingered bartender
serves shots, thrown straight
back, miniature chalices waiting.
Twelve years ago, the same year
I came out, the owner of Mamzelle's
blew her brains out; last year in
San Francisco a woman thwarted
in the bathroom ran into
the street, shot herself
outside the club;
Gay liberation, or not,
tonight at Hepburn's, 1 a.m.,
the shots keep coming, close range
lodging in the flesh of night;
some are near misses, others
wait near major arteries--
all go straight to the brain.

- from Hepburn's, 1 a.m.

She doesn't flinch from examining even the toilet bowls she threw up in, the binges, the drugs, the stupid desperate risky almost embrace of death, or her own anguish. In a poem addressed to herself at 14 she asks,

If I tell her the women
she will become are writing
the words that will save her life,
will it matter?

- from Hanging on the corner, 1973

Will it? Haven't we all asked ourselves that question? Isn't the advice she doesn't give so very true for almost all of us? Isn't it the books, the sympathetic and romantic novels, the impassioned poetry that kept us alive when things looked mighty grim? This poetry is impassioned, the kind that can save lives, sometimes the author's own.

Copyright © 1996 Lee Anne Phillips
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

This is family history not in vengeance but with a caress, as one might find a forgotten trunk and discover the gown your mother wore at her wedding, Grandmother's quilt, the photos and memories of generations opened, gaping, raw, before your questing eye and hand. Here are the sweet descriptions of good moments as well as the slow-motion replays of events that jarred the frame around the pretty life in pictures; the stories of the school burned down, the visit from the Klan, the drunken fights, the history of personalities not suited for each other and how they culminate in death and repression of a shameful past in a troubled family.

Sweet Mystery is a uniquely Southern story with an emphasis on family lines and oral history passed down beyond the reach of most families, at least in America. Only in the South is heritage quite so finely prized, the good with the bad, to make this kind of exposition possible. "Do you want to hear about Queen Victoria and Prince Albert? Do you want to hear about Grandmother Jane and the Yankees?" These are the kinds of stories mixed indiscriminately in with Three Billy Goats Gruff in the author's unhappy Southern childhood.

Many writers would have been content with writing one more bleak story of growing up in a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic mother and an abusive but Ms. Paterson has achieved a viewpoint that let's us see the warm beauty as well as the pain in these very human lives, the larger patterns of ancestry and struggle that bring these people into sharp focus, with both their strengths and weaknesses revealed as if embedded in their very genes and blood.

Through it all runs the slow river of place, the detailed geography of the land echoing the rhythms of the lives led rooted in the land, as much a part of it as are the pecan and mulberry trees. These are portraits of people, not just figures in the author's own version of her childhood. It is significant, I think, that her mother and father are given their own names, a recognition of their own reality beyond the roles of parent. Their relation to each other is seen through many eyes, flicking back and forth until the pictures merge into a three-dimensional whole. The history of each played back through a sort of time-lapsed composite camera that faithfully records the ebb and flow of past generations at the revealed faces of the present.

Copyright © 1996 Lee Anne Phillips
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Flight opens with a poem and segues to a computer screen, as modern as can be and yet addressing a world of discourse as old as humanity: Who am I? Where did I come from? What happens next? Vanna Bonnta has an answer in the person of Aira Flight, an emissary, if you will, of the true reality. We first meet Aira Flight in her shuttle craft, which travels the dimensions as well as time in perfect freedom. We follow her as she is captured by an inimical being and thrown into our own world, a "quantum" Candide in an innocence complicated by partial amnesia.

Amnesia is a central theme in this expository and sometimes didactic novel: Aira Flight's loss of her real self is more poignant and revealing, perhaps, than that of the rest of us because she knows, in part, what she is missing. But we're all amnesiacs, some willing and some survivors of a coerced "lobotomy" which seems implausibly evil until you look at recent history. There do seem to be wicked beings enough to perform the vilest of deeds, once they harden their hearts and set their minds to knowing what's best for other people. Indeed, lobotomy has only recently lost its favor among the medical professionals, who misused it to "cure" everything from depression to "criminal tendencies."

It's curious, though, that she attributes our collective amnesia to a hostile and malevolent agency; to my knowledge, the Manichean hypothesis is rarely invoked to explain our lack of information about the life before and after, although it does furnish an important conflict with an implacable foe, with cooperative (and firearm-wielding) agents, which serves to enliven the plot and drive along the story.

Apart form an occasional tendentiousness, which I think we must forgive as she is so obviously committed to the beliefs and worldview she lays out clearly here, the book has much to recommend it, especially to aspiring participants in the new age vision she posits as the ground of her "fantasy." It's hard to find too much fault with a book which ends, in part:

The people knew what had made them human. It was not their shortcomings, but their hearts.

...

Truth can never die,
for it is Life itself,
and Life is the victor,
the soul the only wealth.

...

I don't think I give anything away here, for this message is implicit in the opening scenes. It is a message more and more people are hearing and in many ways. This book is a new and pleasant voice in a swelling chorus.

Copyright © 1996 Lee Anne Phillips
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Determined. That's the word that comes first to mind when I read these vignettes of Sikh life in India and abroad. Women determined to survive, to be alive, and, desperately, to be free. Few of them succeed in their desire for autonomy but you can feel their struggle in your own mind and heart as you read. She weaves a rich fabric of arranged marriages and chunnis, bad-luck sneezes and winding turbans, as varied and exotic on the tongue as mango pickles and chapatis.

Her characters take very interesting looks at us looking back at them as well. Being blonde myself, I'd never thought of blonde hair as the infallible sign of the prostitute but there you are; different peoples have different eyes for detail and different ways of partitioning the world. Another example of the essentially alien thought process of one of her interlocking characters, nameless by cultural oversight and youth, is captured in, "If I had a Muslim baby, would I have the courage to drown it?"

"Would I have the courage to drown it?" She is speaking of her father's sister, who was abducted and raped by Muslims during the Partition. Of course, the sister is "dead" to the family for "allowing" this "dishonor" to come to the family. She has begged to come home but the family will not accept her with a Muslim child. Later, with the child "gone" ("It stayed under the water too long. "), they still won't accept her because of the "shame" she brought on them. Very hard choices in a very hard life.

The nameless girl's brother says to her at one point, after credibly and dispassionately threatening to kill her if she tattles on him for smoking, "What does your love matter? You're just a girl." This is no childish taunt but the words of an almost man of sixteen years repeating the lessons learned at his father's knee. During a pistol shooting demonstration at which she is present but curiously absent from consideration, he makes the brother fire the gun and tells him that it is his duty to kill his sister with the pistol if the Muslims come. Her brother says, simply, "I will." Thus casually is utter madness passed on from generation to generation.

This is a world in which women can be truly important only in negative ways, as a stain on family pride, as an impediment to prosperity, to be disposed of as casually and thoughtlessly as wringing a chicken's neck; where the occasional gift or fond embrace is merely the indulgence one might offer a pet. Sometimes I have to shake my head to clear it; the author sucks me into this suffocating world so deftly that insanity seems almost normal and folly becomes nearly logical. Almost I can feel the shackles settle themselves invisibly on my wrists and the fingers brush against my throat.

Copyright © 1996 Lee Anne Phillips
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

This online publication is a cooperative effort by many women and will be changing as time goes on. The overall purpose of the site is to encourage women to read women's books and to buy women's books at women's bookstores if they possibly can. The site is loosely (some might say chaotically) connected with the Feminist Bookstore Index, an online resource indexing women's bookstores all around the world, and we encourage you, if any of these books sounds like they would interest you, to find the women's bookstore nearest you (if you haven't got a favorite one already) and support women's words by buying women's books at women's stores.

Fine Print

The opinions expressed herein represent the thoughts of each individual reviewer as they react to the book in review and are not indicative of the thoughts of any other woman or of the collective thinking of Women's Books Online, which actually has no collective existence other than as a site on the world-wide web. Any errors or omissions are either entirely my own or the separate errors and omissions of the individual reviewers but we disclaim any responsibility other than correcting such errors as they are brought to our attention. Someone will respond promptly to any author or publisher who contacts the site (probably me) with corrections or notification of any mistaken statements of fact such as a misspelling of the author's name or of the title of the book (hey, these things happen) or perhaps you could submit another review (as described below) if you can find someone other than the author (who might be rather more partial to her own book than the average reader) to write the review. Omission or inclusion of a book in this review is neither a condemnation nor an unqualified endorsement of any particular book but merely represents the fact that time and space are finite and we can't review everything but only what strikes our uncollective fancy of the moment. If you know of a book you'd like to see reviewed, please feel free to inquire about it to me or to anyone else on the page, or write your own review and, if it meets our flexible and ever-changing standards and time schedules, it will appear in a future edition.

Neither this file nor any of the individual reviews contained herein may be copied or reduced to any permanent medium, whether electronic, magnetic, paper, or any other storage medium, other than temporary and incidental transfers of data for the purposes of viewing in a web browser or other viewing client, nor may they be used for any commercial purpose, without the express written permission of the individual authors.

Thank you for your continuing support of women's books and bookstores,

Lee Anne Phillips, The Un-Management

Women's Books Online Graphics and Web Page
Copyright © 1995, 1996 Lee Anne Phillips
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Contact:

Women's Books Online
4200 Park Boulevard - Suite 250
Oakland, CA 94602
USA

Graphic Design by:

Individual Reviews Copyright © 1995, 1996 by Their Individual Authors
All Rights Reserved Worldwide


Archived on July 12th, 1996 by Lee Anne Phillips
in Oakland, CA, USA