Your Loving Arms

Rating:
Summary: Gritty, honest, tender, and true
Review: Please don't be put off by the title. This is not a soppy romance. It *is* an erotic, tender, and loving novel about the slow-growing trust between two women. Their hungry passion alone can't sustain them, but love -- well, that's the question. Can they love? trust? heal together?

Beth is a drug-addicted ex-con, a skinny poor white from a dysfunctional family. Tammy, her lover, comes from a loving, large family, but she suffers from personal losses and the vicious effects of racism.

The two narrators -- one black, one white -- speak in distinctive voices, each with her own rhythm and vocabulary as well as theme. Together, their voices create an extraordinarily textured and dazzling work of art.

Few books (land even fewer first novels) bring together such raw honesty and such extraordinary writing skill. Comparisons with Dorothy Allison are inevitable -- and justified. I hope that, like Allison, Gwendolyn Bikis finds a loyal audience in the straight, high-literary world as well as among gay and lesbian readers. She deserves it. This book should be nominated for a Lammy, but also for the National Book Award. Yes, it is that good -- and I'm a critical reader.

Buy it. Read it. Marvel at it.