From Publishers Weekly
Twenty-two-year-old Gina moves to Emeryville, a colorful mining town in the days of the Wild West and now notable mainly for its poverty and its lesbian community. Unaware of the group's existence before her arrival and vaguely considering herself heterosexual, she nevertheless quickly finds herself in the arms of Maggie, an eccentric artist whose trademarks are a goatee and a 10-gallon Stetson. In general, Gina's actions seem without motivation. Dropped by Maggie, she drifts into an affair with the voluptuous June, then suddenly declares her love for Myrna, an intense Chippewa woman. Although the first novel traces the results of a bias attack against the women by a fundamentalist preacher and their responses--including a spectral visit from an infamous madam of yesteryear and a masterly solution by Maggie, who foils a plan to erect a statue of the Virginp. 167 --the action is overshadowed by frequent descriptions of atmosphere and states of mind, and undermined by flat, uninvolving characters. The main rewards here are the vivid, often lovely descriptions of the Montana countryside.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this first novel, 22-year-old Gina arrives from Seattle in the mining community of Emeryville, Montana, where she meets a group of lesbian women living on the edges of town and society. They have abandoned the mainstream and are barely managing to survive economically, but their emotional lives are diverse and complex. They have only each other and their vision of a world in which they can have the freedom to be themselves. The details of life in a rural community are well drawn, as is its claustrophobic atmosphere, but the densely layered story takes too long to gather momentum and has too many threads to weave comfortably into a compelling narrative. Despite a time-honored message with broad applications, this is definitely for a select audience.
- Marilyn Jordan, North Miami P.L., Fla.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Marilyn Jordan, North Miami P.L., Fla.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
