Literary Lesbians

It's been quite some time since our last meeting, so my memory is probably a little rusty and these notes will be less detailed than usual!

Jude, Shelley, Lisa, Marg, Julie, Marj, Ange and Sam came along to discuss this book. Welcome to our Literary Lesbian first-timers Shelley, Marg, Julie and Marj. Great to have you along!

We agreed that the book wasn't exactly high literature, but "it's amazing what you'll forgive if there's a lesbian plot"! Jude commented that she'd rather watch a good straight movie than a bad lesbian movie, and Julie pointed out that the problem was that those were generally the only two choices!

Julie pointed out that the characters in the book were fairly clumsy for surgeons! They were always hurting each other as an excuse for physical contact.

We laughed about how Pearce, after being hit on the head with a baseball bat during the car jacking, suddenly then wants kids.

We all agreed that the best bit of the book was when the two characters first met. We all knew then that they were going to end up shagging, but we had to wait until two-thirds of the way through the book before they finally got it together!

There was discussion about how the characters were again stereotypical cut-outs. The butch dyke, the femme-coming-out, the daughter "Ronnie" and the black friend.

As usual, the sex scenes were the subject of critical analysis and a reading-out-loud, to much laughter. Someone pointed out that there were 4 pages of foreplay and that it all took so damn long! Jude also commented on the fact that the two characters seemed to narrate their sexual encounters all the way through: they talked about who's doing what to whom, who's coming when, did you come, etc.

We wondered why lesbian characters in the past few books all had these ridiculous names (Pearce and Wynter in this one). We brainstormed some lesbian heroine names for future books: Cherry Bomb, Busty, Skip, Charity, Chastity, Blossom.

We chatted about the books we had read this year, and which we had loved and which we had hated. We mostly all liked Alma Rose, although Jude pointed out that it was exasperating for her and that the main character "should have just gone to uni and got a good degree"!