by Janice Eidus ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1987
Heavy-handed first novel about sexual passion and feminist identity. The closest of friends throughout their childhood (they explore their sexuality by acting out elaborate psychodramas with their many toy dolls), the beautiful Rebecca and the plain Sagana later have a parting of the ways on that eventful drunken night when 1) they finally make love together, and 2) they also both become pregnant, in the same bed and by the same man (the unenchanting cipher, Evan). Sagana's buried feminist rage comes to the surface after the babies are born; taking her own infant daughter with her and kidnapping Rebecca's, she sets off to found a radical-feminist commune in the wilderness, where she'll convert women to Amazons and murder the few men she's brought along with her (including the hapless Evan)--after they've been used for Amazon-seed ("" 'Evan has passed on. Just today, in fact. He's dead, Rebecca. I suppose someone had to tell you' ""). As the novel opens, lovely Rebecca (who has hitherto been more interested in sex than motherhood) has made her way to the commune with the aim of getting back her baby daughter Lily; she accomplishes this feat, though barely escaping with her life, becomes a doting single mother back in New York City ("" 'Did Sagana murder him, Lily?' she asked, but Lily wasn't speaking yet""), only to have Lily die suddenly and inexplicably in her crib. Purified and hardened by grief, Rebecca, at novel's end, prepares for a new meeting with Sagana, though confident now that ""she was growing closer. . .to herself."" Robot characters pushed around in a Zap Comics plot. One feels as Rebecca did when she tried to imagine childbirth: ""Her body. . .simply couldn't handle it.
Pub Date: June 1, 1987
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Fiction Collective--dist. by Sun & Moon
Review Posted Online: N/A
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1987
Categories: FICTION
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