Customer Reviews

Sweet Creek

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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".

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.

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.

I'm having a little trouble with this one. Perhaps it's me, but it seems disjointed at times and hard to follow. If there were more of a plot, it might be easier. The throw backs to the hippie era seem more annoying to me than a lesson in history. I also find it difficult to "bond" with the characters. It is quite well written and will certainly appeal to many others, unfortunately, not me.

While this book is extremely well written, the story and characters are also extremely hard for me to follow. There are some great lines, but it was a struggle to finish the book and for me to actually figure out what the point of it was. Maybe the book was trying too hard to be unique. Too many stereotypical butch/femmes and "earthy" lesbians too.

I could not be happier with this book. Each character is so unique that you would hope one day to meet each of them - enthusiastic & dear 'Jeep', and Katie who is more in tune with her work than the people in her life. Strong & dependable Donny and her partner the warm and loving Chick. 'R' who dominates all who come into her sphere but who isn't as one dimensional as you might think, and Abe/Abeo who is completely audacious. M.C. (boo-hiss!) and Sheriff Joan Sweet who is an enigma I would like to read more of. And several other folks inhabit the pages of Sweet Creek and you will long remember them.

The uniqueness of each character and moment kept me turning the page long after my tired eyes complained that I should call it a night - thanks to the publisher for publishing such a substantial book.

Perfect for the beach or evenings spread out over the week. The characters leap off the page at the reader. You will find yourself holding your breath, the tension in some moments is so real. Loaded with humor and thrilling rollarcoaster moments. The town itself is wonderfully depicted, and what a great name "Waterfall Falls" - lol.

Sweet Creek was selected by the Q Syndicate's Book Marks in their 2006 Top 10 Fiction List, chosen by Richard Labonte. Also nominated for the upcoming Lambda Literary Award as Best Lesbian Fiction of 2006.

From the publisher's website - 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.

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. Sweet Creek is set in a town near a vortex in the Pacific Northwest. Emerging and changing relationships challenge the women who inhabit this special space, and as the four central women who move to this dyke magnet become family, they learn to lay their fears and ghosts to rest.

Lee Lynch has been proudly writing lesbian stories since the 1960s when she was a frequent contributor to "The Ladder," the only lesbian publication at the time. Since then she has published a dozen books, her stories have appeared in a number of anthologies, and she has written reviews and feature articles for "The Lambda Book Report" and many other publications. Her syndicated column, "The Amazon Trail," has been running since 1986.

From the web - The author is also the recipient of the Alice B. Reader's award for Lesbian Fiction 2007 and a 2006 Inductee of the Saints & Sinners Literary Hall of Fame.

Don't miss the other titles from the author -

Toothpick House 1983
Old Dyke Tales 1984
The Swashbuckler 1985
Home in Your Hands 1986
Dusty's Queen of Hearts Diner 1987
The Amazon Trail 1988
Sue Slate, Private Eye 1989
That Old Studebaker 1991
Morton River Valley 1992
Cactus Love 1994
Off the Rag: Lesbians Writing on Menopause, Anthology Edited with Akia Woods 1996
Rafferty Street 1998
Sweet Creek 2006 * Golden Crown Literary Society Award finalist

The first thing that surprised me was how good this was. Not because I didn't expect that from Lynch, but that I didn't expect it from Bold Strokes Books. It doesn't seem to fit their genre (it's not a Romance). I could see this published by a mainstream press (their loss). All that said, as with many mainstream books that are perfectly good and fine, this one missed just a bit for me. Maybe it was the ensemble cast--I found it hard to pick any one person to root for. Donny and Chick are hardly the main portion of the story. It is set in the early 2000s, but felt more like the '80s or '90s. Some things didn't feel real, like having to be closeted in this town full of out dykes and much of the conflict (why the closet was necessary, what the bigotry consisted of) was more told than shown. She also leaps the story forward by days or weeks, then goes back to fill in. So I felt a bit disconnected. But the one character I really wanted to know better had no POV of her own and little of her story told. Till the end. Wow. Reminiscent of Atonement, but much more satisfying, that last bit, right down to the last line, blew me away. I'd have liked more of that in the rest.

Early in Lee Lynch's Sweet Creek, Chick and Donny, two of the main characters, discuss the inhabitants of Waterfall Falls:

"Every time I try to figure out how many I lose count, and I've been around eight years. Help me here, Chick. There's the land women, the music crowd--"

"The softball players and the artists and writers."

"The wannabe teachers and financial planners and social worker types--"

"The blue collar dykes who pump gas and paint houses--"

"The druggies--"

"And there's always some overlap, like lesbian welfare moms who write poetry and hang with the jocks."

Chick and Donny's assessment of the cast of characters in their small town can lead one to a comparison between Sweet Creek and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's book presents a cross-section of medieval life as his pilgrims make their way to Canterbury Cathedral on a religious pilgrimage. At the heart of Sweet Creek is a group of pilgrims. Some, like Chick and Donny and the mysterious R, have already arrived at their destination, while others, like Katie and Jeep, are just arriving and must depend on the earlier travelers to help them traverse risky and uncharted spiritual, mental, and romantic territory.

As the novel opens, Katie and Jeep arrive in Waterfall Falls, a small town in the Pacific Northwest. They've made their way on a circuitous route that has taken them from San Francisco to Chicago and finally to Waterfall Falls. They stumble, quite literally in the case of Jeep, into Natural Woman Foods--an organic food store run by Chick and Donny.

Unlike the traditional religious pilgrim who has an idea of what he/she is seeking upon arrival at a shrine, neither Katie nor Jeep has a fully realized notion of what she is looking for. Both are running away from lives they think they no longer want to live, running toward an idealized life centered around women who control their own lives and destinies. They have heard of this feminist, lesbian wonderland from an acquaintance and set out on their pilgrimage. What they find when they get to Waterfall Falls sets each of them on further quests.

Like Chaucer's pilgrims, Lynch's characters tell stories throughout the novel. Through flashbacks, we see how Donny and Chick came to be the women they are. Donny, a self-proclaimed bulldagger, not only had to deal with prejudice against her sexuality, she also had to face prejudice about her race. As a black lesbian, Donny has perhaps had more to overcome than the other women in the novel. Chick is a leftover hippie; it's easy to imagine her dancing with flowers in her hair during the Summer of Love. Like Donny, she has had to face adversity because of her sexuality. The two of them, eight years into a monogamous relationship, have faced their share of romantic adversity, too, as Donny at first ran from the attraction she felt for Chick.

The novel wanders through stories of the characters' past lives and present events at a leisurely pace. It is not a fast read. Chick, Donny, Jeep, and the women who comprise their closest circle of friends are compelling characters, and readers will want to know more about their motivations, fears, and dreams.

Lynch has to be commended for tackling a novel of such grand scope. Even as some characters and situations beg credulity, the book overall is successful at providing a look into the journey that lesbians have taken over the past forty years in this country. From characters who lived their early years deeply closeted to characters who have benefited from the pioneering work of those women who were brave enough to break away and blaze the trail to places like Waterfall Falls. These women--warts and all--show the reader that this pilgrimage is still underway.

[...]

I enjoy this author's work so I got this one. There many characters to get to know. And their names are orginal Jeep and Chick are a couple. It had a wide range of ages for the characters. from their 20's to late 40's.
There were parts of this book that made me laugh. Alot of self examination by the characters. Which I am sure if you are like me or them you have asked yourself the same questions.
I liked this book ok. I don't think I would read it again. It was hard for me to get through it the first time. If you want a couple of laughs and wonder what the characters results of "what do I do with my life?" And "do I have a purpose when I am this old?" then you may enjoy this book