GOLDEN NINETIES, THE

Rating:
Summary: Borderline crazy
Review: Lisa Mason's Summer of Love and The Golden Nineties both have this quality - you want to reread them as soon as you've read them. Her writing conveys an abiding love of San Francisco, and interesting bits of California history are woven into the storylines. The writing is so compelling that you feel as though time travel were a possibility. I hope she writes more of these San Francisco fantasies, and I'm sorry to see these are evidently out of print!

Rating:
Summary: Hypnotic Read
Review: Lisa Mason's Summer of Love and The Golden Nineties both have this quality - you want to reread them as soon as you've read them. Her writing conveys an abiding love of San Francisco, and interesting bits of California history are woven into the storylines. The writing is so compelling that you feel as though time travel were a possibility. I hope she writes more of these San Francisco fantasies, and I'm sorry to see these are evidently out of print!

Rating:
Summary: Borderline crazy
Review: Wowsers. The main character is strong-minded feminist, who at the beginning of the novel is arrested and sent to 1890's San Francisco. There, she's put in a sitation where she's forced to live a degraded lifestyle in a house of prostitution. Despite her radical feminist background, she easily falls into a masochistic relationship with a drug-addict who starts things off by raping her. Through it all, she's an active participant in both the masochistic relationship and the degradation of prostitution.

These serious themes are dealt with oddly, as the author downplays the ugliness inherent to the situation. The rapist is also the romantic interest, and is depicted as a pretty good guy trying to get over a troubled past. The rapes are generally inferred, to the point that it's easy to not realize them. Lip service is paid to the faults of prosititution, but it comes off as a pretty good career choice for women. Zhu's mental state through all of this is unclear, but seems stable.

Overall, the story gave the feel of a soft-core masochistic sex fantasy, written in the form of a sci-fi novel. That's weird enough, that although I don't have any desire to read more by this author, the book itself maintained interest. Also, I live in Oakland, and am interested in the history of San Francisco and Oakland (actually, that's why I read the book). This novel did a so-so version of invoking the times.