Middlesex: A Novel
by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002)
This long-awaited second novel from the best-selling author of The Virgin Suicides begins, "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smog-free Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." Middlesex covers three generations of a Greek-American family: grandparents Lefty and Desdemona, brother-sister lovers fleeing marauding Turks in the 1920s; father Milton in Prohibition-era Detroit, who rose as a hotdog king; and young Callie raised in the swank suburbs of Grosse Pointe, but who doesn’t appear to be “like the other girls.” One of the best things about this delightful coming-of-age novel of a hermaphrodite is that Eugenides is able to capture both the voice of a young girl Callie and the unfolding young man Cal. (Terry Nordbrock)

My Heartbeat
by Garret Freymann-Weyr (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002)
Ellen is14 years old, just starting high school, and is totally in love with James, a high school senior who is her brother Link’s best friend. As Ellen reflects, “One day I looked at James and thought, he has the best face. It is full of long eyelashes and hidden smiles.” She will always love James as well as her brother Link. One day at school, someone comments to Ellen, “James and Link are like a couple, aren’t they?” What follows is Ellen’s sensitive and compassionate thought process about James and Link. She decides to “never ask them. Ever. I resolve to put it out of my mind. There is no reason for me to know.” But yet she does want to understand her brother and help her parents understand him. Things begin to unravel when she questions James and Link. Link refuses to discuss it. James refuses to stay friends with someone so full of secrets. All their relationships begin to change from Link to James, Link to Ellen and Ellen to James. As Link begins his own searching for sexual identity, Ellen and James begin theirs. It is Ellen’s first sexual experience, and James’ first sexual experience with a female. My Heartbeat is a sincere story of love, friendship, family, and the confusion and complications of sexual identity. (Gina Macaluso)

Out of the Shadows
by Sue Hines (Avon Books, 2000)
Rowanna hasn't come to terms with her mother's death by a drunken driver. Since she won't talk about the accident, the fact that her Mom was gay, or that she lives with her late Mom's lover, Ro has a lot of secrets that even her best friend Mark doesn't know. Enter Jodie, the new (and beautiful) girl at school; and you get a teen triangle of unrequited attractions. First-time novelist Hines shifts the point of view between Ro and Jodie, nailing the black and white extremes of adolescent emotion. It's a good book for teens confused about love and life, only flawed when Ro's guardian Deb becomes too saintly. (A regular adult would never have all the right things to say.) (Beth Petrucci)

Pages For You
by Sylvia Brownrigg (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001)
Flannery, a 17-year old college freshman, falls head over heels for Anne, a brilliant teaching assistant, in this novel chronicling the experience of first love. Brownrigg captures her heroine's delirious feelings and sensual discovery without being cloying or artificial. Flannery's inevitable awakening from her romantic dream is handled with a wholly satisfying clarity and balance. (Chris Dashiell)

The Powerbook
by Jeannette Winterson (Alfred Knopf, 2000)
In Winterson's seventh novel, Alix is an email writer who seduces the lover and reader through a storied world, one that moves through time, gender, and geographies. The Internet missives re-draw the tales of Lancelot & Guinevere, Paolo & Francesca, even Mallory & Everest. Tales of great obsessions and great ruinous, impossible romance are intercut with the modern romantic interludes of Alix and her married woman lover. The modern conflict is well-worn ground for a Winterson novel, but the language is delicious. (Beth Petrucci)

Rag and Bone
by Michael Nava (Putnam Pub Group, 2001)
Henry Rios, a gay Hispanic lawyer, is shocked to learn his sister, a lesbian, has a daughter, who is now missing. Henry locates Vicky and her 10-year-old son Angel. When Vicky is charged in the murder of Angel's father, she turns, reluctantly, to Henry for help. Meanwhile, Henry is falling in love, for the first time in many years. And he's discovering a new role for himself, that he's not sure he wants: as a father figure for Angel.

It's really a shame that Nava has announced that this is the end of the Rios series and his career as a mystery writer. (Laura Thomas Sullivan)

She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not
by Lesléa Newman (Alyson Publications, 2002)
This is a very enjoyable collection of eleven romantic short stories with lesbians as the protagonists, exploring a variety of perspectives, subjects, and moods.

“Keeping a Breast” explores a fear common to all women whose doctor discovers a suspicious lump and mentions the dreaded C word. “Bashert” tells the story of a woman’s self-discovery on a kibbutz in 1977, and how it culminated in a showing of her paintings many years later. In “Mothers of Invention,” the final story of the collection, a butch partner recounts her struggle to accept her femme’s desire to have a child.

I rarely read short stories, but I reacted to these the way I do to salted nuts – I just couldn’t stop. (Laura Thomas Sullivan)

The Sissy Duckling
by Harvey Fierstein, illustrated by Henry Cole (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2002)
Elmer, with his modern coif and pink backpack, is not your average boy duckling. The other ducklings make fun of him because he prefers to bake, create puppet shows, play with the girls, and lead cheers. But when he flees from a bully, his father is angered by what he perceives as weakness and adds to the name-calling. Elmer’s heart crumbles. Much like GLBT youth today, Elmer runs away from home. After he has masterfully decorated his new hollow tree home, he is still sad and lonely. He decides to take one last trip home to see his mom and dad fly south for the winter, and watches as his father is badly wounded by hunters, unable to join the rest of the flock. Courageously, he carries his father to safety and nurses him back to health, showing everyone just what a sissy is capable of. The Sissy Duckling is a must-have children’s book for anyone desiring to eliminate gender stereotypes or boost their child’s self-esteem. (Karyn Prechtel)

Stay: a novel
by Nicola Griffith, (Doubleday, 2002)
This is Griffith’s second mystery featuring tall blonde killing-machine Aud Torvingen, a former Atlanta police officer now in deep grief for her lover Julia, whose death she caused in the 1998 book The Blue Place. Aud fled to her cabin in the Appalachian mountains for emotional healing, but an old friend ferrets her out to track down his missing fiancée, Tammy. The pace picks up when Aud finds Tammy in a Soho loft, along with the madman Geordie Karp who has enthralled Tammy as his sexual and psychological slave. Aud uses her grief as a weapon to stop Karp, and along the way confronts her own violence and brutality. Dubbed by the Village Voice a literary "Femme Nikita," Griffith’s has won the praise of mystery readers, including crime writer Dennis Lehane. (Terry Nordbrock)

Through It Came Bright Colors
by Trebor Healey (Harrington Park Press, 2003)
Neil is a twenty-something college student from the suburbs of San Francisco. He’s just dropped out of school for a semester and is living at home to help his family cope with his brother Peter’s newly diagnosed cancer. He is also in the closet about his sexuality. Through Peter he meets Vince, another cancer patient. Besides having testicular cancer, Vince is also an incest survivor. Thankfully he is neither self-pitying nor stuck in the role of victim. He’s smart and amazingly well read, though not easy to warm up to. In fact, he’s difficult to like, though worthy of respect. I liked that Through It… doesn’t blindside the reader with the horrors of incest. Mr. Healey has created characters that are motivated in interesting ways, without being presented in a heavy-handed manner.

After a few dates, Neil becomes enamored of Vince. Vince is his first acquaintance with a gay man of similar age and is unlike anyone Neil has ever met before: loud, opinionated and out. In a funny episode Neil and Vince, on one of their frequent wanderings about San Francisco, go to a Tibetan Buddhist Center where Vince introduces Neil as his “homosexual lover.” This is about as close as Vince can come to acknowledging his feelings for Neil.

This is a well-written first novel; the characters ring true and their stories, while intertwined, are neither confusing nor outlandish. Though someone does come “out,” it is not a coming out tale, and I wouldn’t call it a love story either, though love and loving are essential to it. I felt it was a story of acceptance; of one’s self, of others and situations that one cannot control.

With Through It Came Bright Colors, Trebor Healey has made a solid debut as a novelist. I hope to read more from him in the future. (Richard DiRusso)

Tongue Tied
by Richard Stevenson (St. Martin's Minotaur, 2003)
Donald Strachey is a gay private investigator from Albany, New York, who rather reluctantly agrees to work for Jay Plankton, a right-wing gay-bashing radio "shock-jock" in New York City. One reason he agrees is because he owes the NYPD detective in charge of the case a big favor. Another reason is because he once had contact with the Forces of Free Faggotry (FFF) that is claiming responsibility for perpetrating a series of nasty pranks against Plankton. It isn't long before Thad Diefendorfer, a gay Amish farmer and former FFFer, joins the investigation.

The pranks quickly escalate from a tear gas grenade thrown into Plankton's studio to the kidnapping of one of the most abrasive members of the on-air staff.

Stevenson writes with great humor (e.g. "woolly cheese made from llama milk") and frequent cultural references, ranging from pop to literary - Howard Stern, George W. Bush, Marcel Proust, Fritz Lang, Elton John, and Ricky Martin, just to name a few. The action moves, in well-described scenes, from New York City to Massachusetts and Long Island.

The characters are well developed. Plankton and his crew fling crude adolescent insults far and wide, even among themselves. Detective Lyle Barner is in the closet, but his lover is a younger officer who is out, and suffers unfortunate consequences daily in the NYPD locker room. Diefendorfer lives on a farm in New Jersey with his partner, a lesbian couple and their child. Strachey is monogamous and happily settled.

Although this is Stevenson's eighth Donald Strachey mystery, it easily stands on its own. (Laura Thomas Sullivan)

Valencia
by Michelle Tea (Seal Press, 2000)
The lesbian bildungsroman has had some drastic changes since Rubyfruit Jungle. Michelle Tea was a co-founder of Sister Spit, San Francisco's annual poetry/prose girl road show and this almost plot-less second novel is full of edgy metaphors. Valencia, a 2001 Lambda award winner, is a fast-paced, semi-autobiographical tour of a year in the grunge Mission District. Twenty-something antihero "Michelle" moves from job to job and woman to woman with stops at poetry slams, dyke marches, and seedy bars along the way. Tea has described her writing as "first person fiction" and claims Bukowski as an influence. (Beth Petrucci)

The World of Normal Boys
by K.M. Soehnlein (Kensington 2001, 2000)
Winner of the latest Lambda Literary Award for best gay fiction, this debut novel by former Tucsonan Karl Soehnlein portrays the teen angst suffered by many gay youth.

We squirm right along main with character Robin McKenzie as he copes with the arguments of his dysfunctional family, who seem rather familiar as the supportive mom, the homophobic dad, the scary tough guy cousin, and the poor younger brother, whose injury in a fall propels the family toward crisis. In love with macho Todd, who fixes cars next door wearing almost nothing, high school freshman Robin experiments with drugs, sex, and cutting school. Those who also had their sexual awakening in the late 1970s will relish the detailed cultural references that can transport you back to the time of Saturday Night Fever and feathered hair. (Terry Nordbrock)