WHERE THE GIRLS WERE, if you're not a worried feminist at the end of the read you didn't read carefully enough

WHERE THE GIRLS WERE
KATE SCHATZ
The Dial Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this electrifying and heartfelt historical coming-of-age novel, set against the tumultuous backdrop of 1960s San Francisco, a pregnant teenager reckons with womanhood and agency after being sent to a home for unwed mothers.

It’s 1968, and the future is bright for seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Phillips is called by her middle name “Baker” by everyone. She’s the valedictorian of her high school, with a place at Stanford in the fall and big dreams of becoming a journalist. But the seductive free-spirited San Francisco atmosphere seeps into her carefully-planned, strait-laced life in the form of a hippie named Wiley. At first, letting loose and letting herself fall in love for the first time feels incredible. But then, everything changes.

Pregnancy hits Baker with the force of whiplash—in the blink of an eye, she goes from good girl to fallen woman, from her family’s shining star to their embarrassing secret. Sent to a home for unwed mothers, Baker finds herself trapped in an old Victorian house packed with a group of pregnant girls who share her shame and fear. As she reckons with her changing body, lack of choice, and uncertain future, Baker finds unexpected community and empowerment among the “girls who went away.”

Where the Girls Were is a timely unearthing of a little-known moment in American history, when the sexual revolution and feminist movement collided with the limits of reproductive rights—and society's expectations of women. As Baker finds her strength and her voice, she shows us how to step into your power, even when the world is determined to keep you silent.

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My Review: I remember my much-older sister having a friend who was sent away to "nature camp" for a few months. Is that transparent or what? It was part of the culture, though, so while there were significant looks and quiet changes of subject, it wasn't treated as stunning or weird. The Pill was very newly available in the US, though I think it wasn't legal for unmarried women in California at that time. The battles of the Second-Wave Feminists for full adulthood and, crucially for Baker's story, bodily autonomy, were still unfolding.

Baker, poor lamb, didn't come from sophisticated people who didn't approve of her accidental pregnancy but didn't freak out. I wished she'd been among my family's orbit as we were there at the relevant time. Alas. Baker's trip to the maternity "home" as it was so wrongly called is designed to cast shadows over her family's star as she falls from grace so she can still be useful to them:

They love her, they're proud of her—and they need her. And that's why no one can know what is really going on. Brilliant young Baker is their ticket, the proof to everyone that their little family has made it, will make it. The future is bright, because their daughter is bright. No one else in this family has gone to college. Baker is going to life them to a new level. This has always been the plan.

The emotional register of the entire novel is in that passage. This extraordinary, exceptional young woman isn't allowed any autonomy, any agency, afforded any support for expressing her own desires or needs. It was a different time, though, right?

How different remains to be seen.

The condescending (at best), judgmental (more usually), shame-dealing (always) hierarchy of Baker's "home" atmosphere keeps all its inmates uninformed as to their own body's workings by doctors refusing to discuss the progress of the pregnancies they're all undergoing, to discuss the realities of giving birth; of course, they're also misinformed and misled about their legal rights as a matter of course. What use instructing these girls in the illusion of legal rights when they all disappear as soon as she marries? No sense giving girls who already showed "poor judgment" by getting pregnant...clearly placing all blame on her, none on the male who was of necessity there at the time...in "rights" she might try to exercise against her husband's will.

It makes me angry even typing it. It made me panther-screechingly furious as I was reading the book. At least the abuse Baker has to endure is not physical as well as psychological. Undermining her confidence and booby-trapping her self-esteem with real, unexaggerated Hitchcockian gaslighting were not compounded by Dickensian-poorhouse deprivational cruelty. Small mercies, I suppose, loom large when the injustice of a situation is so star and so terrible.

As her due date approaches, Baker begins to use her reporting skills to keep herself sane in a place that isn't sane. She discovers there are darker patches than hers in her family's past. It's a well-handled side quest that reveals the seemingly immutable law that no surface is a real gauge of how the structure underneath is supported. It's almost always a lot more ramshackle and surprisingly at variance with appearances. A story at once familiar to me on generational axes while being at wild variance with my own privileged-male upbringing, Author Schatz's adaptation of a common story was inspired by her own mother's life story. I found the read engaging, enraging, and enlightening, as Baker brought home to me the personal and emotional realities of the absence of agency women are being forced back into.

No one with a daughter, a niece, a sister, or a mother should fail to engage with this story's emotional underpinnings. In Author Schatz's telling, the story of an unlucky young woman's odyssey through a cruel, indifferent-to-her system paying alone for a "sin" she did not commit alone, is edifying and devastating by turns. It is a must-read.

MICHELLE CHOUINARD'S PAGE: The Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco series

THE SERIAL KILLER GUIDE TO SAN FRANCISCO (The Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco #1)
MICHELLE CHOUINARD
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In Michelle Chouinard’s clever mystery The Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco, the granddaughter of a serial killer shows readers another side of the beloved city.

Welcome to San Francisco, a city with killer charm.

The chill of a San Francisco summer can be deadly. No one knows this better than Capri Sanzio, who makes her living giving serial killer tours of the city. Capri has been interested in the topic since she was a kid, when she discovered she’s the granddaughter of serial killer William ‘Overkill Bill’ Sanzio. She’s always believed in his innocence, though she's never taken the leap to fully dive into the case.

But now an Overkill Bill copycat has struck in San Francisco. And Capri’s former mother-in-law, Sylvia, just cut off Capri’s daughter’s tuition payments. Needing cash, Capri wonders if this is the time to exonerate her grandfather. The case is back in the news and the police will be looking to understand the past to catch a present-day killer. Capri could finally uncover the truth about Overkill Bill—documenting the process with a podcast and a book—and hopefully earn some money.

Before Capri can get very far, the cops discover the copycat’s latest Sylvia. Capri soon finds herself at the heart of the police’s investigation for an entirely different reason. She and her daughter are prime suspects.

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My Review: Weird premise...descendant of serial killer makes living talking about serial killers despite feeling ancestor was innocent...but played for laughs. Shouldn't work, should it?

It does. Mostly because the serial-killing part is discussed, without strong gore emphasis and in the context of Capri's tours. It still feels...weird. But the way the premise leads to Capri herself being a suspect in a copycat killing is very apt, logical, and still not really expected.

What very much is expected is Capri's love interest in Detective Petito, and blessèdly not Ryan (a tech whiz and co-runner of her tour company). I am really tired of this trope. At least freshen it up, make Petito into Louisa, SOMEthing other than another tedious obligatory heteronormative "romance" grafted onto a story to tick a box.

I admit I was amused that the victim whose fate twigged the cops to Capri was her ex-mother-in-law, who had just cut off financial support for Capri's daughter's education. Nice touch, Author Chouinard. What wore on me a bit was the nature of detail I was presented with...I am uninterested in who made or sold more accurately your leather goods, for example...in an abundance I found tiresome. I did enjoy the San Francisco setting mostly because it was well integrated into the plot and not smashing into me in a deluge of verbiage.

Speaking of San Francisco, as the haunt of tech and thus finance bros, there is significant tech-talk. Again, it's there because it's germane to the crimes and to their solution, it's not inaccurate to my limited understanding...though I'm very certain some of the actions taken are illegal and would get their perpetrator sanctioned, fired, and/or prosecuted, not to mention being inadmissible in a court...so I rolled with it. You may not wish to be tech-talked to, so be aware it's there.

The copycat's identity is consistent with all the clues and the nature of the crimes committed. The mystery resolves in a way I found satisfying, and left room for Capri's return. All in all a read I liked, a series I'll read more of, and if anyone knows a development exec at Hallmark, this series would do good business for their channel in Octobers for years to come.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A TOUR TO DIE FOR (The Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco #2)
MICHELLE CHOUINARD
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In Michelle Chouinard’s A Tour to Die For, Capri Sanzio is back, giving a true crime tour her guests won’t soon forget. After all, a tour guide who specializes in serial killers knows better than most that San Francisco is a city with killer charm.

Capri Sanzio knows that when you give serial killer walking tours for a living, unexpected situations are more common than San Francisco's famous fog. So, when one of her guests claims to see a woman being attacked during a tour, Capri remains unfazed. The police search the apartment in question and find no evidence of anything amiss, so they chalk it up to a false report from a true crime fanatic looking to be a part of a case. And Capri thinks they might be right, since lately her tours have been attracting even more obsessives than usual—as it turns out, finding the actual serial killer who committed the "Overkill Bill" murders didn't stop the constant questions about her grandfather's supposed crimes, it only intensified them.

But Capri would never forgive herself if someone is in trouble and she walks away. Plus, something about the whole situation has every one of Capri's investigative journalist instincts going haywire—why would someone lie about seeing an attack? So Capri starts to dig, and when her questions lead to a body, she finds herself at the center of another murder investigation.

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My Review: Building directly on the resolution of the first story in the series, we meet Capri as she's about to go on a date with Detective Petito, who piqued her interest most saucily and expectedly...but they really can't go out during a case they're both involved, now can they. So now they're not in that situation, all clear, right?

Wrong. Quelle surprise. Capri's riding high on the back of the first case's notoriety...proving she's not guilty of murdering her slimy ex-husband's mother out of spite is hardly a spoiler, it's a mystery series not Roger Ackroyd redux...and her serial-killer tours of her belovèd San Francisco are booming. Maybe too much so, as one of her tourists insists a murder took place in an apartment near the tour's route. Is an overzealous, eager-to-be-a-witness imagination at work? The police respond to the scene, find nothing, and assume that's the case.

Not so much Capri. She does not dismiss the concern, something's up...so investigation mode activates and off we go. And off goes that date with Detective Petito, of course.

Shenanigans ensue, the scoobygroup works their way through the clues, and the ending is satisfyingly apt. I don't think the second bite of the apple is as fun as the first because the novelty's worn off, I do not care for—or about—the romance, and the scumbaggery of Capri's ex around his late mother's palatial home honestly feels shoehorned in to me.

Will I read the next one? I won't say no, and I'm not counting the days, either.

TRAMPS LIKE US, a bit of history all in 21st-century Western culture could learn from

TRAMPS LIKE US
JOE WESTMORELAND
MCD (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A treasured cult classic following a young gay man crisscrossing 1970s and ’80s America in search of salvation. Now reissued with an introduction from Eileen Myles and an afterword from the author.

Abused by his father and stifled by closeted life as a teenager in Kansas City, Joe, the wide-eyed narrator of Tramps Like Us, graduates from high school in 1974 and hits the road hitchhiking. But it isn’t until he reunites with Ali, his hometown’s other queer outcast, that Joe finds a partner in crime. When the two of them finally wash up in New Orleans, they discover a hedonistic paradise of sex, drugs, and music, a world that only expands when they move to San Francisco in 1979.

Told with openhearted frankness, Joe Westmoreland’s Tramps Like Us is an exuberantly soulful adventure of self-discovery and belonging, set across a consequential American decade. In New Orleans and San Francisco, and on the roads in between, Joe and Ali find communities of misfits to call their own. The days and nights blur, a blend of LSD and heroin, new wave and disco, orgies and friends, and the thrilling spontaneity of youth—all of which is threatened the moment Joe, Ali, and seemingly everyone around them are diagnosed with HIV. But miraculously, the stories survive. As Eileen Myles writes, “I love this book most of all because it is so mortal.”

Back in print after two decades and with an introduction by Myles and an afterword by the author, Tramps Like Us is an ode to a nearly lost generation, an autofictional chronicle of America between gay liberation and the AIDS crisis, and an evergreen testament to the force of friendship.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: When I first read this in the Aughties it was already historical fiction. It was my life, my graduating class, and my generation of gay men who were, to all intents and purposes, vanished. Many died that I knew...almost none I was really close to until the late 1980s.

Reading the story again, at well over sixty, reminded me forcefully of that *horrible* severing. All hope seemed to die. With every memorial service there was less reason to feel as though anyone cared, as though people like me were on anyone's priority list.

I started volunteering here and there. I saw christians at their absolute worst. Mothers rejecting dying sons, fathers speaking loudly with their absence...it was the last nail in my faintest glimmers of religiosity.

So being there wasn't...nice...but it did make me recall the value of community (and the reality of burnout). When my true love was dying of CMV in 1992, I had men around me who loved him, and who supported me so completely (thanks Joe and Domingo!) that I could latch onto Ali and Joe as they created their magic circle, as they ran from haven to hearth looking for home.

It was breathtaking. It was heartbreaking. It was very much the way I want to remember the squashed possibilities of gay liberation...none of this *fighting* for equal rights we've been distracted with for decades, but coming up with new ways to define ourselves in the world.

Not even my grands have come back to that level.

What might have been, sighs the young heart in the elderly chest. Visit it for y'all's selves.

BARRY LANCET'S PAGE: JAPANTOWN & TOKYO KILL, first two of his Jim Brodie series

JAPANTOWN
BARRY LANCET (Jim Brodie #1)
Simon & Schuster
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this “sophisticated international thriller” (The New York Times Book Review), an American antiques-dealer-turned-reluctant-private-eye must use his knowledge of Japanese culture to unravel a major murder in San Francisco—before he and his daughter become targets themselves.

San Francisco antiques dealer Jim Brodie receives a call one night from a friend at the SFPD: an entire family has been senselessly gunned down in the Japantown neighborhood of the bustling city. As an American born and raised in Japan and part-owner of his father’s Tokyo private investigation firm, Brodie has advised the local police in the past, but the near-perfect murders in Japantown are like nothing he’s ever encountered.

With his array of Asian contacts and fluency in Japanese, Brodie follows leads gathered from a shadow powerbroker, a renegade Japanese detective, and the elusive tycoon at the center of the Japantown murders along a trail that takes him from the crime scene in California to terrorized citizens and informants in Japan. Step by step, he unravels a web of intrigue stretching back centuries and unearths a deadly secret that threatens not only his life but also the lives of his entire circle of family and friends.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Oh dear. I'm really Over the "Asians are naturally master assassins" trope. It's a whole star off. The parts about being trained and the family inheritance of the skills...well, I'm gonna say it: "1984 wants its tropes back." I could hear "Mr. Roboto" playing in the background.

Then I realized the book is ten years old, and it makes more sense. 2014 is culturally closer to the 1980s than the 2020s are. And please can we retire forever the "grieving for dead wife fuels badassery" trope? It's called fridging nowadays and it plays poorly in 2024. I myownself never liked it because women aren't solely victims which is the message this trope sends.

So, well, since you hated it why'd you review it? is forming on your mental lips. I didn't hate it. I was very intrigued by Brodie's multicultural upbringing and his proficient code-switching from sleuth to art-world wheeler-dealer; from US to Japanese norms; from loving dad to vengeful rageball. Author Lancet manages all these transitions without making me, a skeptic towards the majority of Brodie's identities, feel like I've got whiplash. An excellent talent, that. A man whose self contains such a wide latitude is a hard creation.

Layers of connection within the story, threads of identities intertwining among the threads of action aren't quite so convincing. Why are we hopping between first-person cinematic view and limited third person? An omniscient narrator doesn't blend well in between first and third person narration, true; but when we're moving between limited PoVs we need to know eventually who the third person is, or it feels like the writer took the easy way out. That diminishes the real impact of the first-person narrator's effortfully built solidity in the reader's imagination.

I'm not honestly able, then, to get past three and a half stars in what would ordinarily have been a more than four-star read. I'll go on to the next on slightly wary but willing to be there.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



TOKYO KILL
BARRY LANCET (Jim Brodie #2)
Simon & Schuster
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In the second thriller of this new series from “a fresh voice in crime fiction” (Kirkus Reviews), antiques dealer-turned-P.I. Jim Brodie matches wits with an elusive group of killers chasing a long-lost treasure that has a dangerous history.

When an elderly World War II veteran shows up unannounced at Brodie Security begging for protection, the staff thinks he’s just a paranoid old man. He offers up a story connected to the war and to Chinese Triads operating in present-day Tokyo, insisting that he and his few surviving army buddies are in danger.

Fresh off his involvement in solving San Francisco’s Japantown murders, antiques dealer Jim Brodie had returned to Tokyo for some R&R, and to hunt down a rare ink painting by the legendary Japanese Zen master Sengai for one of his clients—not to take on another case with his late father’s P.I. firm. But out of respect for the old soldier, Brodie agrees to provide a security detail, thinking it’ll be an easy job and end when the man comes to his senses.

Instead, an unexpected, brutal murder rocks Brodie and his crew, sending them deep into the realm of the Triads, Chinese spies, kendo warriors, and an elusive group of killers whose treachery spans centuries—and who will stop at nothing to complete their mission.

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My Review: Oh great...Japanese assassin dynasty first, now Chinese triads.

Not my favorite transition. Nor is the grafting on of the seemingly inescapable "love interest," a woman (natch) to help Our Hero forget the wife he lost before book one began. I'm not as forgiving the second time out. The same "Asian assassin dynasty is invincible until white guy raised in their culture comes along to show 'em how it's done because because they killed his wumman" stuff that turned me off of James Bond happens here.

Do better. This crud's tired and so am I. Though I admit the artistic bit of the series interests me, it felt totally unintegrated into the story this time; permaybehaps the miasma of heterosexuality, always disagreeable to me, got in my way.

Wharever; I'm out.

RADIANT FUGITIVES, debut novel from a recovering capitalist has all the heartfulness

RADIANT FUGITIVES
NAWAAZ AHMED
Counterpoint Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$17.95 trade paper, available now

A BOOKRIOT BEST BOOK OF 2021!

Rating: 3.75* of five

LISTEN TO THIS PODCAST: “Living in America Is Like Living in an In-Law’s House.” with Author Ahmed on Mitzi Rapkin's First Draft Podcast

OCTOBER 2021 UPDATE Read this brief profile about Author Ahmed in PW!

The Publisher Says: A tour-de-force debut following three generations of a Muslim-Indian family confronted with a nation on the brink of change in Obama-era San Francisco and Texas with a blockbuster ending you have to read to believe.

Working as a political activist in the early days of the Obama presidency, Seema still struggles with her father’s long-ago decision to exile her from the family after she came out as lesbian, forcing her to construct a new life in the West. Now, nine months pregnant and estranged from the father of her unborn son, Seema seeks reconciliation with the family that once renounced her: her ailing mother, Nafeesa, traveling alone to California from Chennai, and her devoutly religious sister, Tahera, an OB-GYN living in Texas with her husband and children.

Pushed apart and drawn together in equal measure by their often conflicting beliefs, Seema, Tahera, and Nafeesa must confront the complex yearnings in their relationships with one another—and within their innermost selves—as the events that transpire over the course of one fateful week unearth an accumulated lifetime of love, betrayal, and misunderstandings.

Told from the point of view of Seema’s child at the moment of his birth and infused with the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, and the Quran, Radiant Fugitives is an operatic debut from a bold new voice, exploring the tensions between ideology and practicality, hope and tradition, forgiveness and retribution for one family navigating a shifting political landscape.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Debut novelist Ahmed has done something special with this book. He has chosen to tell a story of rigidity and rage, of tenderness and forgiveness, and of sadness and loss from the point of view of a perinatal infant whose mother has died in trying to give him life.

That is a bold decision. And it's not a spoiler because there's no way you could possibly miss it...the author says it plain and straight on the first page. I spent the first few pages a little unsure of the wisdom of it, because it will inevitably lead to the Satanic Second Person sooner or later. (Sooner as it turns out.) But the choice, like all bold gambles, carries a certain momentum that either weighs the reader down or drags him along in its wake. I was dragged. I wasn't sure I would be. When the infant addresses his grandmother as "Grandmother," I confess I winced and even pooh-poohed the idea. I was too taken in by the way Seema, the "hasbian" (in the ugly, dismissive formulation I've heard lesbians use towards one who marries a man...why not "bisexual" I've always wondered) mother of this child, was continually struggling to find her footing in the narrative...bad choice for a narrator; Nafeesa, the terminally ill grandmother, was too cowed and rendered voiceless by her entire life's denied course; Tahera, the rigidly religious sister, was too ragey and resentful. No one else matters, their quiet places in the story don't ripple strongly enough to compete with the women and their unborn male relative. I definitely include the father in this. Poor bastard.

Back to our narrator, Ishraaq (meaning "Dawn"). He is the right choice to tell us this story because, like all infants, it's the story he inherits by his simple act of drawing breath. So my cavils were set aside, and the story progressed...familiar things happened. For example, I recognized the divide between the sisters as superficially being about their differing faith-walks but really being about the disfiguring jealousy of sisters denied the place they thought was theirs. Sibling rivalry was always going to rip their relationship to shreds. Their mother wasn't capable of standing up for herself, still less her daughters, against their forceful father and his ungovernable passions for poetry and control. Keats isn't used as a love language in their family so much as an armory of unresolvable resentments...it's their father's favorite work, and their mother was bludgeoned with it despite her love of her native Urdu and its vast, beautiful literature.

As an adult, Ishraaq's mother is an out lesbian. That goes over badly with her devout Muslim father. Mother, of course, submits her actions to her husband's control. They cut their heretical daughter out of their lives. And she, for her part, builds quite a world for herself in activist politics, while her dutiful and Muslim younger sister becomes a family physician...so no slouch in the brains department. Such a lot of anger for Big Sis from childhood...it quite naturally fuels her religious rejection of Seema for her lifestyle. In his role as narrator, Ishraaq doesn't dwell on the particulars of his mother's sex life, which I think was a good authorial call. It doesn't feel to me as though anything in the story requires us to follow the characters into their bedrooms. I noted the fact that we mostly hadn't, and then thought, well, what a great way to make use of such a narrator!

What I didn't find so believable was the way Ishraaq was sometimes omniscient, discussing things that would be impossible for him to know because the belly he was inhabiting was elsewhere. A conversation between his father and grandmother marked the first time I was jolted into awareness of the issue. It's here that the reader will stall out..."this is impossible, forget it"...or will reach the accommodation that I did: "we're assuming a consciousness is Ishraaq, not the infant flesh is Ishraaq, and the story ends when he's mere moments old." I'll get past my collywobbles re: magical narrators if there's at least a shred of a line to cling to as I suspend my disbelief. It was a close-run thing, though.

Events happen that ground us in the US of 2010. Obamacare, Kamala Harris as a candidate for Attorney General, mosque vandalism...all struck resonant chords in me. I was also taken by setting the narrative in San Francisco for the most part. I loved the atmospheric descriptions of San Francisco's fog belt, and the evocation of Dolores Park. The use of color in the book is quite elegant...a deep, unrepentant purple sky!...as is the food the characters prepare, offer, consume. There's a much-needed specificity to these moments. A great deal of the book feels less moored, grounded, because it's a flashback. The past that Ishraaq narrates, or observes I suppose, and then describes, is of necessity less vibrant than a directly shown and not told timeline would be. In many ways this choice was made when Author Ahmed chose his narrator. There really is no other practical way to tell a story from that point of view.

There are secondary characters with arcs that will shock you. There are characters whose "it's all my fault"s rang in my ears as solipsistic and self-important. There are moments of sheer blithering idiocy when decisions that should've been postponed are instead made and made badly. And that's one of the best things about the book to me. I enjoy a story with real-feeling stakes...death is a real stake, and there's more death in the book than is at first evident. The "radiant fugitives" of the title, what elicits that particular descriptive phrase, make for one of the book's set it down and say "wooow" moments.

But even the death serves its purpose. People are never more themselves than when they are around death. The selves they are, all too often, are not the selves they want to be. And it's this immense tension that gives Radiant Fugitives its narrative drive, its memorable ending, its full measure of sadness and rage, love and compassion. It's a book that forgives its characters for being less than their best selves and giving less than their all when they're called to step up. The ending will strike some as overdone, it did me, but it was most certainly an organic, honest ending to the story we started out reading. That makes the journey a good and worthwile one, and as a debut novel, one of above-average skill to create.

But, and I mean this, someone at Counterpoint needs to fix "Irvine, Texas" to read "Irving" because Irvine's in California. Irving's in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

DISASTERAMA!, a funny, poignant memoir of coming (and coming, and coming) of age during a plague

DISASTERAMA!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997
ALVIN ORLOFF
Three Rooms Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: DISASTERAMA: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997, is the true story of Alvin Orloff who, as a shy kid from the suburbs of San Francisco, stumbled into the wild eclectic crowd of Crazy Club Kids, Punk Rock Nutters, Goofy Goofballs, Fashion Victims, Disco Dollies, Happy Hustlers, and Dizzy Twinks of post-Stonewall American queer culture of the late 1970s, only to see the “subterranean lavender twilit shadow world of the gay ghetto” ravished by AIDS in the 1980s.

In Disasterama, Orloff recalls the delirious adventures of his youth—from San Francisco to Los Angeles to New York—where insane nights, deep friendships with the creatives of the underground, and thrilling bi-coastal living led to a free-spirited life of art, manic performance, high camp antics, and exotic sexual encounters.

Orloff looks past the politics of AIDS to the people on the ground, friends of his who did not survive AIDS’ wrath—the boys in black leather jackets and cackling queens in tacky frocks—remembering them not as victims, but as people who loved life, loved fun, and who were a part of the insane jigsaw of Orloff’s friends. In Disasterama, Orloff tells their story: the true tale of how a bunch of pathologically flippant kids floundered through a deadly disaster.

My Review: First, read this:

I would become a writer! It made perfect sense: I'd always been socially awkward, pretentious, moody, self-loathing, judgmental, and besotted with the sound of my own voice. What else could I be?
–and–
Unlike prostitution or promiscuity, stripping was entirely public. One foot on the state would forever mark me as a disreputable character, the sort respectable people called a sleaze. On the other hand ... I didn't know any respectable people and my workday would be a mere thirty minutes long. And, I had to face it, some quirk of my psychic constitution rendered the strictures of ordinary jobs insufferable to me. Restaurant work felt like a cross between the treadmill at the gym and one of those Japanese game shows on which contestants are abused and humiliated in front of a sadistic audience. Office work was even worse, calling to mind those B movies in which some poor soul—bound and gagged, but eyes wide with terror—is slowly walled up brick-by-brick in the dungeon of some damp, rat-infested Transylvanian castle.

If this isn't raising a chuckle, Author Orloff (I Married An Earthling was an earlier title of his, which I reviewed rather grouchily twenty years ago) might not be the guide to a bygone day that you personally will warm to. I find his work pretty funny.

I'm Author Orloff's age. Despite being born within hailing distance of the place, I spent little time in San Francisco, more in Austin (a surprisingly queer place even then!) and New York, but the world we lived in as young men has utterly vanished. Many of the guys I knew are dead...many aren't...but all of us have empty slots where loved people once stood. But enough long-face!

The plague and the insurgency it fuelled were forging a previously unknown camaraderie and it was fun. Just then, fun was a political issue. For decades the media had painted gay men as a sad victims of loneliness, depression, suicide, insanity, and/or murder. The Gay = Tragic meme receded a bit during the height of '70s hedonism, but was making a strong '80s comeback with the modern twist that our inevitable bad end came from AIDS. The innocent victim gayboys might be sympathetic, but the pity they evoked felt maudlin and slightly toxic. People wanted to end their days in a party, not a puddle of tears.

What a fast-paced and nostalgic look back at a moment when being young was fun! It can't be helped that AIDS took the lives of so many. It feels like the world Orloff describes (and illustrates with candid snapshots and collected ads, posters, and the like...who the hell keeps this ephemera?!) is as distant as World War II. These days, fun seems dead and young people have to think about what we had the luxury of ignoring.

Selfishly, I'm glad I could ignore it. Responsibly, I wish I hadn't had that choice. Take the walking tour of a vanished world with a cis-white queer punk-party boy who grew up way, way too hard. Maybe not too fast, considering he's still whinnying with us.