Lesbian Fiction

[HH]

Title: Outsiders: The Collection
Authors: Lynn Ames, Georgia Beers, JD Glass, Susan Meagher, Susan Smith
Editor: Linda Lorenzo
Publisher: Brisk Press, 2009
Genre: contemporary fiction

I love anthologies. I love the variety of voices and themes, the discovery of new authors, the re-discovery of familiar authors. Of course, each individual reader will find that some stories work for her and others don't, but that's part of the fun of a collection. And unless the collection is very bad indeed, every reader will find in it enough pleasing stories to make it worth her time and money and effort. This collection of five novellas is in no way bad; and, happily, the copyediting is very clean, with only a few errors in dialogue-tag punctuation.

For me, the stand-out story was Georgia Beers's Balance: well-written, with a strong, distinctive first-person voice reminiscent of Heinlein and an unusual storyline. The romance is very subtle and understated, and is simply reflected in the narrator's ongoing appreciation of the love and support she gets from her partner. The story itself is urban fantasy, but the characters and setting are so clear, so well-grounded, so realistic, that the appearance of magical Post-It notes doesn't cause so much as a blip in the reader's suspension of disbelief. The narrator's work, which involves helping women in need (as instructed by the magical Post-It notes), has some inherent moral dilemmas; these are diluted by the very black-and-white cases presented in the story, and the potential for a lot more "grey" is there, were this to be fleshed out to a full novel. However, there's enough focus on the moral issues of the narrator's work to give the reader something to think about the next day, and the story is kept light enough to be a fun, enjoyable read. And, probably, a fun enjoyable re-read: I liked this piece enough that I'll go back to it and read it again someday. I'll also look for more of Beers' books; I'm not much of a romance reader, but if her future books include other genres I'll certainly want to buy them.

Susan Smith's Billy Boy is an intriguing literary work. The prose, for me, could've used a tiny bit of pruning, and the initial passive flashback slowed the story's pace at the start far too much. The heavy focus on the protagonist's relationship with her best friend over several decades initially seemed to make the story unbalanced, but the story's culmination brought the theme back full-circle so that the beginning made more sense; still, I'd have preferred a bit of a trim of the first several pages. The story takes a stark look at several contentious issues: lesbianism versus bisexualism, April-December relationships, and the ethics of teacher-student romances. I found that I didn't wholly approve of the protagonist's actions and choices, but the story is stark and deliberately contentious, and thus is very thought-provoking. The protagonist's clear recognition that her relationship with Billy Boy would (like all relationships) not be problem-free and would likely have a finite lifespan was refreshingly honest and realistic. This is another author whose work I'll be happy to read more of.

Lynn Ames's In A Flash is a magic realism story featuring a "fated" romance between a Native American woman and a wealthy, famous photographer. The prose is good on a sentence level but the story's overall structure seemed a bit jerky; I felt the author was trying to pack too much story into a short piece. The use of two point-of-view characters didn't quite work for me and diluted the story's potential; I'd have preferred it if Ms Ames had stuck to one POV and focused on either the Native American woman's emotional journey as she's almost forced into a relationship with a very unlikeable woman due to their being reincarnated soul mates, or on the photographer's story as she learns to understand and accept her psychic gifts. I thought too many things were glossed over: for example, the NA woman allows her lover to photograph sacred tribal lands and tells her she's the first non-tribe person ever to set foot on those lands, but there is no consideration of how her tribe might feel about this potential betrayal. The photographer’s thoroughly unlikeable personality undergoes an impossibly saccharine transformation simply through her falling in love and accepting her telepathic abilities, and I wasn’t quite unable to suspend disbelief. However, it was an enjoyable read and I would certainly be open to reading another Ames story, particularly if she continues writing magic realism and/or characters of colour; I can see a lot of potential and predict that this author will get better and better over time.

Susan Meagher’s Blackout features two diametrically opposed characters: a wealthy, famous, beautiful author, and a photographer who eschews all worldly goods – an interesting set-up with plenty of potential. The latter character seemed particularly unusual and intriguing and engaged my interest. The pair meet at a book signing, there is a power outage, and they get to know each other as New York struggle to survive without all the mod cons for a few hours. However, the writing was average at best, relying on clichés and pedestrian prose. The point-of-view changes were unclear and confusing. The tension was non-existent. I read about ten or fifteen pages, waiting for something to happen, something to go wrong, some problem to crop up that the characters would have to deal with, but nothing ever did. They have a drink, go to dinner, and the only bit of drama – the famous author throwing a tanty when a driver doesn’t stop and offer them a ride – happens off-screen. I gave up halfway through the story and skipped to the end, where, predictably, the two characters are in bed with each other. So, sadly, this one wasn’t quite my cup of tea.

JD Glass’s Triskelion begins with a first person narrator whose internal monologue introduces four character names and their relationships in the first page. The second page switched to third person and introduced yet more character names. I simply could not figure out who anyone was, where they were, or what they were doing. The prose was, for me, overwritten and pretentious and a bit too twee, and nothing the characters did or said engaged my interest because I was thoroughly confused. I gave up on this one after a few pages and couldn’t make myself go back to it, so I’ve no idea what the story is actually about.
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[Nurse Jo]

Thanks HH. Looks an interesting collection. I've read all of those authors, although obviously not those particular stories and I'm not terribly surprised at your assessment of J D Glass or S Meagher. One for the to buy list.
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She rolled her own and kept her money in her stocking.
(Describing Laura Evans, a Colorado madam)

[tanner]

Sounds interesting and worth a look for the first three alone. Thanks for the review, HH!
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If it has tires or testicles, it's gonna give you trouble. -- Lauretta Hannon, The Cracker Queen

[wildlx]

Thanks, HH . I am also not surprised of your assessment regarding some of those authors.
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The only reason people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory. - Paul Fix

[HH]

It's one of the things I love about collections -- you get to try a bunch of authors for one low price I'd read Beers once or twice before, and she's certainly a competent romance writer, but that's not a genre I read much of. So finding she's written an urban fantasy was totally unexpected for me, and the story was a real treat. Susan Smith I've also read before, and so I did anticipate another good, literary piece. Lynn Ames and Susan Meagher were new authors for me, and I was delighted to have a chance to read some of their work.

I won't be surprised if this collection starts a new trend in lesfic -- novella collections. Readers are often reluctant to spend ten or twenty (or, in the case of us furriners, thirty or forty) bucks on a new author, but if they can try two or three new authors for that price and get stories from authors they already know and like, it's a great deal for the reader, and also a great way for authors to find new readers. How better to debut a few new fantasy authors than to put their novellas in a collection with a spanking new story from Jane Fletcher? How better to give romance readers access to two or three new writers than to put their novellas in a collection with stories from Karin Kallmaker or Gerri Hill?
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[HH]

Another reader's review, for comparison:

http://kiranerys101.livejournal.com/26568.html
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[Baker]

My reactions to the stories in this collection are pretty similar to HH's.

Ames's story suffered right off the bat from a transposition of the time line that effectively killed the dramatic tension she'd been building. It didn't help that there was no good reason for her doing it. The plot was nothing out of the ordinary, but might have been enjoyable save for one of the characters being wholly unsympathetic--despite about every trick in the authorial toolbox to try to make her sympathetic, including being misunderstood and stunted by her parents. Her sudden transformation at the end into someone who might be a worthwhile human being just didn't work for me. The prose was serviceable, though clumsy at times. The woo-woo element of the story was nothing particularly novel, and I found the explanations offered for it...unconvincing. But then, that's me, right?

Beers' story was much better. Readable and she did not make the mistake Ames did in trying to explain the inexplicable: Beers never presented any attempts to rationalise the Post-It notes. Clever move. The problem I had with Beers was one I had with all the stories in this anthology: it needed a good pruning. All the stories are longer than your average short. I suspect the authors took a lack of length restriction as license to ramble a bit. That was a shame. All the authors should have done themselves a favour and asked Linda to take a red pen to them. In Beers case, what ought to have ended up in out-takes were a lot of the unnecessary--and borderline saccharine--exchanges between the narrator and her partner. Some were necessary: but there were too many and too long. It diluted the tension and gave the story a rambling feel. One particular problem with being a chronically slow reader--such as me--is that any extraneous length really stands out. So, Beers' story could've done with a little less self-indulgence in the cosy relationship prose. Although, if we want to really talk about self-indulgence in prose, the next story leaves this one for dead.

Let me say right upfront that JD Glass's story might have got dramatically better after the first 2.1 pages, but I couldn't get any further than that. Too many POV changes. Too many character names. Too many unexplained "something had happened". This was just a couple of pages, remember. I had no idea who the characters were, what had happened, or what the story was. Once you discount that, you're left only with the prose as a point of interest. Sadly, for me the prose was even less of an inducement to keep reading than the other elements. The little I've tried to read of JD Glass has left me with the impression that she likes, most of all, to write for herself. In this story, she certainly didn't make much of an effort to engage my interest.

Susan X Meagher's story was next. I'd not read anything by her before, and I'm unlikely to again. I didn't manage to finish this story. It was slow, rambling, and aimless: The prose was clunky and cliched; and the characters as thin as the paper the story was printed on. I had a feeling I was in trouble with this story in the third paragraph when I read a loving description of one character's yoga pants. HH tells me that Meagher's novels are doorstops (i.e. very long), and it's not hard to see why from the leisurely pacing and the sheer number of words she takes to get anything across. Here's an example (p200):