Sweet Creek [Paperback]

Lee Lynch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2006

Sweet Creek is a story of love, community, and the changing tides of time set in a town where trannies, lesbian cops, aging gay hippies, womyn's landers and rural couples come in search of a lesbian paradise. Two left over lesbian hippies, now in their 50's, Donny and Chick run the vegetarian Natural Woman Foods store. In Donny, a black lesbian and Chick, her lover, Lee Lynch continues to depict the struggles of working class butch lesbians and femmes. Author Lee Lynch tackles broad themes that affect us all: love, death, gender and aging in a novel rich with love, friendship, passion, and romance.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Bold Strokes Books (January 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933110295
• ISBN-13: 978-1933110295
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,444,566 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply masterly, March 6, 2006

By 

L-J Baker - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sweet Creek (Paperback)

If you want one of the clone lesbian romances (with white, plastic, over-achieving, gun-toting, wealthy, unbelievably sexy, perfect characters who wear designer clothes and all have simultaneous orgasms--and often) "Sweet Creek" is not for you.

If, on the other hand, you want to read a book with depth of feeling and breadth of insight, and which deals with deftly-drawn, genuine, 3-D characters who lead awkward, lumpy, difficult lives in the real world without shying from the hard facets of our lives and without dishing up palliative, trite, unrealistic solutions, then this is your book.

Lee Lynch writes with the understated, seamless, deceptively effortless style that only true masters of the craft can achieve. I wish I could write something half as good: I'll settle for being able to read and re-read "Sweet Creek".

It's books like "Sweet Creek" that prove that lesbian writing can be truly literary and meaningful and entertaining. This is the best book I've read in a long time. I'll proudly put it on my shelf beside "The Female Man".

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a spectacularly good novel, March 2, 2006

By 

FranW (NZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sweet Creek (Paperback)

Sweet Creek doesn't need to be confined to a narrow category of "lesbian fiction" or "feminist fiction" in order to merit being described as spectacular. It's brilliant, moving, well-written literature, period. I hate the fact that most lesbian fiction seems to me to be superficial, poorly-written crap stuffed with gratitutious sex and whiz-bang explosions to cover up its myriad faults. But Sweet Creek doesn't use or need crass sex. It doesn't have those super-rich, super-beautiful, super-sexy, white-bread, all-American, wholly-unbelievable characters that bore me to death. Sweet Creek is about real people with real lives and real problems and real ups and downs. It's one of the few books I own that I'll read again and again.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Drop a line in the waters of sweet creek, May 25, 2006

By 

M. J. Lowe "www.mjlowe.info" (Denver, Colorado United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sweet Creek (Paperback)

From the pen of the venerable lesbian author Lee Lynch comes a novel set in the small rural community of Waterfall Falls, Oregon, at the turn of the millennium and populated by an amusingly high volume of lesbians. One character suggests an inverted energy draws women to the community.

"A dyke vortex. I like it." Chick made a mental note to suggest it to the sheriff, a native who was completely baffled, and not particularly pleased, at the disproportionate numbers of lesbians in Elk County.

... [Jeep responds] "Cool beans! I moved to the poor dyke's Palm Springs."

"Yeah," added Donny. "We don't golf, we fish." (60)

The heart of the area's queer community rests in Natural Woman Foods, a small organic general store and cafe run by ex-hippie, earth-mother dyke, Chick, and her tough but mellowing, working-class, former player, butch partner Donny. Together nearly a decade, the two are struggling with the changes of advancing crone-hood. Chick has a family history of mental illness and worries her current struggle with depression might be symptomatic of something worse. Meanwhile men from their pasts are stirring trouble for both women.

If Natural Woman Foods is the heart of the community, Chick is its reigning queen, er, "femme in charge." (34) She looks after several women in this role, and has many amused, often indulgently affectionate observations about butches, the butch/femme dance in general, and the changes she's seen in community politics (gay and straight).

Up and coming television reporter, Katie, with her flame of the moment, Jeep, arrives looking for something new for her life. She finds herself quickly enamored with the leader of the women's land, a fierce, enigmatic woman named Rattlesnake, or R for short. Katie consequently develops an interest in documenting the struggles the local separatist commune has with the traditional logging industry.

Soon, Jeep, (a melding of "G. P." for Gina Pauline) who appeared in Waterfall Falls sporting a city-styled buzz haircut and a restless attitude, finds herself nursing a broken heart, looking for a new place to live, scrambling to make a living, and trying to sort out what she wants to do with her life. Jeep's coming of age is one of the themes of Sweet Creek and several of the story threads depict transitional life periods.

As is frequently the case with small communities, everyone seems to know everyone else's business. Still, a few surprises arise over the course of the book. Lynch portrays this ensemble cast of charming and interesting characters with humor and insight. Sweet Creek originally appeared as a series of short-short stories in Girlfriends Magazine and the brief episodic structure has been retained in the chapters. This allows for bite-sized consumption of the various storylines that struck this reader as a dyke hybrid of Keillor's Lake Wobegon stories and Maupin's Tales of the City series. While this format makes for easy episodic reading, it sometimes results in meandering plotlines that might distract some readers and could have benefited from some tighter editing. Nevertheless, Sweet Creek is filled with engaging life stories and charming snapshots of the locale. Fans of Lynch are bound to enjoy Sweet Creek, and hopefully new readers will discover her work as well.