An Emergence of Green [Paperback]

Katherine V. Forrest (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2005

A REISSUE OF THIS GROUNDBREAKING AND BESTSELLING LESBIAN FICTION CLASSIC The reissue of Katherine V. Forrest's timeless story of all-out war between a man and a woman for the body and soul of the woman they both desire. In the 1980s, the politics of feminism were just beginning to gain mainstream awareness. In this fast-paced novel, first published in 1986, Lambda Award winner Katherine V. Forrest nurtured a new genre of fiction: the lesbian emergence novel. In AN EMERGENCE OF GREEN, one of the best-selling lesbian novels of all time, an unplanned encounter between trophy wife Carolyn Blake and her new neighbour - tall, athletic artist Val Hunter - leads to a close friendship and deepening emotions that young Carolyn has never known. Carolyn begins to question her attitudes, her life, her marriage, and her sexuality. The two women's intense physical encounters force Carolyn at last to acknowledge her true desires and to rethink her values and her cloistered life. Can Carolyn really give up comfort for unfamiliar territory, stability for fulfilment?

Editorial Reviews

Review

"One of the best selling lesbian novels of all time." - Rubyfruit Review

About the Author

Katherine V. Forrest is an institution within lesbian fiction. She is the author of the hugely successful Daughters trilogy and the Kate Delafied mysteries (all available from Turnaround).

Product Details

• Paperback: 230 pages
• Publisher: Harrington Park Press (September 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156023542X
• ISBN-13: 978-1560235422
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,722,889 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Emergence of an Entire Genre and of a Remarkable Author, January 18, 2006

By 

Bett Norris (St. Petersburg, FL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: An Emergence of Green (Paperback)

Alice Street Editions has released a new edition of this 1986 novel by author Katherine V. Forrest, originally published by Naiad Press. If you read this novel long ago, it is worth the purchase price just to read the foreword from the author and the afterword written by Victoria A. Brownworth. But the book is worth rereading for its own merits.
Set in 1984 in Los Angeles against the backdrop of the Olympics and the presidential campaign involving the first (and only) woman candidate for vice president, the novel is not dated at all by this, nor is it dated by its subject matter. It is as fresh and nuanced and topical as if it had been written today.
The point is made in the afterword that Ms. Forrest writes about lesbians for lesbians. In this novel, among the first in a new genre of lesbian fiction, Ms. Forrest carefully and skillfully presents the male character, the antagonist, as fully drawn and as sympathetically as one could, a man trapped by his upbringing and his past and the social mores of his time. One may not feel sympathy for him, given the inevitable and violent denouement, but we can certainly understand him.
In fact, a reader might even begin to feel less sympathy and more impatient with the main character Carolyn Blake than perhaps might be expected. She is a trophy wife, married at nineteen to a man ten years older who is already well established in his corporate career track. She sublimates her own education and career to his, leaving jobs to move with his transfers, seemingly accepting without question that her career is less important. A friendship with the woman next door, Val Hunter, a divorced artist with a son, allows Carolyn, and the reader, to begin to draw comparisons.
One of the most interesting things about this novel is how close we get to all three main characters. We see Val through Carolyn's admiring eyes and growing affection, and also through Paul's growing resentment and jealousy as he comes to understand she is his rival. We see Carolyn both through her husband's idealistic view as a possession of which he inordinately proud, and as Val comes to know her, a vibrant woman who has spent far too much time acquiescing to Paul's idea of the perfect wife. Carolyn struggles to continue to believe her husband's possessiveness is a product of his impoverished childhood, the early loss of his mother, and his love for her, which she believes is genuine. Val sees a grown man who is domineering and arrogant in his presumptive male superiority. She instinctively feels there is something infantile about Paul's need for Carolyn, and Carolyn herself often refers to her husband as a little boy. Once she thought of this as an endearing trait, but she begins to feel his need to have her with him as clinging, suffocating, and ultimately controlling.
The tug of war that ensues between husband and friend for the heart and mind of Carolyn Blake slowly escalates as the sexual tension and awareness between the two women increases.
For those who haven't read this book before, a few words of caution. The nature of sex itself is at the heart of this novel. There are no pulled punches here. Ms. Forrest is not shy about delineating the intimate sexual details of a marriage and, exquisitely, the sexual and very sensual relationship between the two women. Nor does she back away from the same attention to the excruciating unraveling of Paul Blake and his eventual recourse to violence as the familiar world he has created starts to crumble.
I once had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Forrest, and found myself peppered with questions about this book, then yet to be released by Alice Street. On the eve of the release of her thirteenth book, the eighth in the Kate Delafield detective series, she wanted to know about a book she had written almost twenty years ago, as nervous as a first time author. Perhaps recalling the critical reviews of many years ago, she asked whether the main character, Carolyn Blake, was too weak.
The answer then and now is an emphatic no. Many women may recognize themselves in Carolyn, guided by the accepted precepts of her time, who believed that in placing their husbands' lives and careers first, they were perhaps doing the hard work often assigned women, that of balancing the cementing of family and home against their own sometimes unspoken desires; to be a woman meant doing what had to be done, and then doing more, if one wanted to also have a career. It takes some time for Carolyn Blake to realize her own needs and to leave behind the conventions to which she adhered but in which she found no rewards for her loyalty, no comfort or room for herself.
The afterword properly places this novel, and Katherine V. Forrest's body of work, firmly in the history of a genre she helped to create, both as an author of great skill, and as senior editor at Naiad Press for ten years.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful Social Commentary Disguised as Lesbian Love Story, April 25, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: An Emergence of Green (Paperback)

Superficially, this makes a very good lesbian love story with the classic, time-honored plot: girl meets girl, girl realizes how oppressed and stifled she is by boy, girl feels despair and ennui as her meaningless life spins out of control beneath the indifferent, star-spangled celestial dome, girl leaves boy, girl gets girl. Oh, wait, the celestial dome thing was from Camus -- forget that one.

But what makes the book more than Another Silly Love Story is the complexity of the soon-to-be ex-husband. It would have been easy to portray him as evil incarnate, a one-dimensional testosterone monster bent on raping and dominating all that is female and free and wholesome and good. But I don't get the impression that he's an unusually bad sort of guy, as guys go. Rather, Forrest makes him a real, 3-D person with real feelings and real motivations, and in so doing is able to make a powerful point about the disastrous effects of socially-constructed gender roles on otherwise reasonable people. Separate-but-equal gender roles are as much a quaint, bigoted myth as separate-but-equal drinking fountains.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful story, December 20, 2001

By 

K. Foreman "a Jane of all trades" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: An Emergence of Green (Paperback)

I began reading Katherine V Forrest's mystery novels and I hate to admit... but I wasn't terribly impressed. Yet so many of my friends said she was one of their favorite authors. So I finally picked up "An Emergence of Green" and now she is also one of my favorite authors.
This is a wonderfully touching story of how the friendship between two women blossom into something more. I highly recommend this book to anyone, gay or straight.
It reads very fast, and I was on the edge of my seat through many chapters not wanting to wait to find out what happens next. The setting is a bit dated, but the story refreshing. You won't be disappointed