i love this book. if z egloff were a man; if this were for young adults; if the market liked stories of women who fall in love with other women, this would have been a best-seller. but maybe i love that it wasn't a bestseller and that one of the two independent bookstores we have in miami had a stack of them in the shop and i liked the cover enough to buy it. the write-ups by alison bechdel and emme donaghue didn't hurt.

many of us complain about the dearth of well-written, powerful women's/lesbian stories (i hesitate to pigeonhole this book: it's a good book for everyone), but you know, they exist. they are just not published by the misogynistic, homophobic big presses. you have to go and find them.

the protagonist of this third-person novel is a 20-something film student with a bunch of hurt under her skin and a huge longing for wholeness, acceptance and love. the beginning is about a Very Bad Thing she did to her college advisor and mentor, as a consequence of which said college professor blackballs her and kicks her out of his class. claire couldn't agree more. the college advisor, with whom she had a genuine bond of admiration and friendship that suddenly counts for absolutely nothing -- not even a conversation or an explanation -- is entirely right. she is scum.

it goes from there. claire fucks everything up. claire is disaster incarnate. claire brings mayhem wherever she goes. and people, kindly, remind her of this all the time. the book reminds her, and us, of this all the time. but when you stop to think you have to ask yourself what it is exactly that claire is doing that is so bad. and you see that it's nothing. claire is doing nothing bad. she is a recovering alcoholic and very hurt, but she is kind and sweet and she tries. she is also very butch, a boywoman, and doesn't much like to care-take, especially when the objects of such care-taking are children. this last is a key motif, because claire's failure to be a caretaker of children is the one thing the novel does not really forgive her. we know this because her path to redemption hinges on turning this around. so maybe we should have a conversation on why women should be good to children. we don't expect this much from guys, do we? do we have gay novels in which the redemption of the main character attaches itself to a sudden awareness that there are kids who need taking care of? i don't know. maybe there are. it's important to be kind to children. but hey, it's okay not to have the child bug.

all in all, though, you feel that the third person narrator, who is very much stuck inside claire's head, is not entirely in her corner. she, the third person narrator, is very down on claire.

and then claire falls in love with this woman religious, and the woman religious with her, and this is done so well, so tactfully and delicately and deeply, it's hard to think of this writer as a first-time novelist. the suspense is breath-taking, the pace masterful, and the whole thing is told with startling wit, sentence by sentence. the wit never lets up.

all along claire, the bad bad person, berates herself for her seductiveness. she is corrupting the (much older) woman religious, just as she corrupted everyone she ever loved or had sex with.

i imagine alcoholism has a lot to do with this, with being unable to bear love, attraction, the very fact of oneself, one's own very existence. but there is also a tremendous amount of internalized homophobia here, and these two women are fighting demons that are way too big for them.

so at the end this is about how women -- religious, not religious -- can cope with loving each other without beating tragically on themselves for this overwhelming want and need.

this whole story is told with such grace, depth, endless surprise, lovely imagery, humor, and skillful construction, it's a delight to read. ( )