Lower East Side Librarian

This time the lesbian teen is a different type of orthodox: Cuban-American from Miami. Laura gets busted with a love note from her girlfriend the last day of junior year and gets kicked out of her house for being a degenerada. Luckily she's got a best friend with and understanding mima who take her in. The book is Laura's journey out of the closet. I found it a little too much, like the author was trying to hard to pack everything in, and the cover reminds me of what they did to Leilaina's film in Reality Bites, turning it from a thoughtful documentary about lost youth into an MTV high concept/low content pre-reality show reality show. That's just the cover and crazy fontage I'm vilifying. The story is fine, but one of those YA novels that is better left to its intended audience instead of middle-aged ladies like me. It has plenty going for it: transgender and genderqueer characters, Cuban Spanish idioms, sexy round chicks, and standing up to homophobic bullies.

About an Jewish Orthodox lesbian teenager, this book couldn't possibly have lived up to its promise. I won't bother telling you not to read it, because I know you will anyway. It's not bad; it's just not as great as you want it to be.

I loved this issue of QZAP:META from the old skool looking front cover photo of sailors making out to the anthemic back cover drawing of a large naked women by Mara Schnookums proclaiming "Any sex I have is queer sex any zine I make is a queer zine." Nerdslut Milo Miller's introduction lays out what it is to record one's life and struggles in zines and to preserve them in libraries and archives. Ze identifies the Queer Zine Archive Project, QZAP, as "part of a vast Yellow Submarine fleet of libraries, archives, and infoshops that all recognize the importance of saving and sharing populist and underground media." Ze makes me feel so proud to be part of that! The essays in the zine ride the activist/academic line in the most delicious way. Plus there's art. What's not to love?

You know how I'm always complaining about stories told in multiple voices? (They should come with a warning on the cover!) Well this is another one. Maybe because they take turns so frequently in this book that you don't get attached, it isn't as much of a problem as usual. Still, maybe because I didn't get attached to any of the characters, it feels the whole time like you're waiting for the book to happen. The connecting stories are compelling enough, but what's really interesting is the look at life in Kuwait. I don't know much about the country, other than remembering learning how rich it is. In elementary school we didn't talk about how you can't be rich without having poor people take care of you. In Kuwait, all Kuwaitis (not including Kuwait-born Palestinians) are pretty well off, which means they have to import their servants and even many of their professionals. Most of the characters in the book are American, Filipino, Indian, or Palestinian, rather than Kuwaiti. It takes a lot of non-rich people to take care of the rich people, I guess.

This is one of those not-a-novel novels: connected short stories told in multiple voices. The central character is Irene Wilson, a contemplative African-American coming of age in a negro area in Kansas City, Kansas around the same time someone named Brown was fixing to sue the Board of Education. I was dazzled by the first story, told in the first person by Irene, which takes place when she is in elementary school. The language is stylish and layered, and the characters deep and nuanced. I wish all of the stories had been by and about Irene, but the multiple voices are tolerable because it's not strictly a novel.

This may shock some of y'all, but I don't always love zine books, that is zines issues collected or even somewhat repackaged. Exceptions include Zine: How I Spent Six Years of My Life in the Underground and Finally...Found Myself...I Think by Pagan Kennedy and Pete Jordan's Dishwasher. Zines are meant to be read episodically; there needs to be some time between issues. I also don't think they all clean up well. They don't all belong in book form, all neatly bound and with consistent margins. I felt the same way about just about every show I worked on at the Public Theater that transferred to Broadway. The shows lost their intimacy in a large house with high ticket prices. Give me a $2 zine over a packaged anthology or a $10 black box play over a spectacular production with moving scenery every time!

I preface my review of Nicole Chaison's Passion to let you know where I'm coming from. I wanted to love it, but I didn't. I liked it, and I bet if I read the zine versions of her stories, I'd love them. One thing I really admire about the book, that I suspect isn't present in her zines is the illuminated manuscript approach, even though I found it confusing at first. Each page consists of minicomics illustrations on the side and text in the center. My problem was that I didn't know what to read first. I eventually found that it was better to read the text and then the art, but sometimes that meant the footnotes would be out of order. Yes, I said footnotes, an element that I found endearing.