Customer Reviews

Flashpoint

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I love everything that I have read of Katherine V. Forrest with the exception of this book. Rather than presenting rich and interesting characters, she has created stereotypes and this is a political polemic rather than a novel. There are other other types of writing such as an essay which would have done just as well as this piece. But please don't let this stop you from reading her Kate Delafield mysteries or The Emergence of Green. I was very disappointed because this is not what I would have expected from a Forrest novel. I consider her one of the best novelists I have ever read. I will consider Flashpoint an abberation. When you mix politics with literature, the results can be either great or lousy. In this case it was lousy.

It's really tough to branch out and write different kinds of literature - essays, mainstream novels, comedy, short stories, etc. - when everyone expects the author to stay in a certain, small, proscribed arena. In Forrest's case, she is known for writing taut lesbian characters in genre action or romances. This book is a departure from that. Though it is now a bit dated, the book explores a more intellectual and political side to the world. The characters are still taut, but they're not all lesbian, there is no hot sex, and romance is not really much of an angle to this story.

The book is well-written and definitely well worth reading. It reminded me somewhat of Patricia Nell Warren's book, The Beauty Queen. Warren got the same small-minded charges that her book wasn't enough like The Front Runner. I applaud Forrest for trying something new, and I liked the book immensely when I read it 10 years ago and now that I have read it again. She's a writer ahead of her time. Perhaps in 5 or 10 or 20 more years, people will go back and read her take on the 90's like they are now with Felice Picano's take on the 80's. Believe me, I think this book will last.

Take a chance here! Read something that makes you think as well as feel! It's worth it. The book is really quite fascinating.

Is this book the same, fun read of rest of KF's novel, probably not. But wow, does it do a great job of giving others a view of what growing up as a lesbian or gay pre 90s was like. Where we now finally have at least the beginning of acceptance and finally seeing those in our community being treated as equals, it certainly has not always been this way. For each of the characters in this book, I know mutliple people that have suffered similar experiences...including myself.

If for no other reason, the younger members of our community owe it to themselves and to our united cause to see what it was like just a few mere years ago. Why voting and being politically aware is so important to them personally, to our commuinity and to our country. It has not always been so easy to be out of the closet and it certainly provides a small insight to some of the scares our community pioneers continue to bare.