An entertaining, poignant panorama of America’s gay scene in its heedless youth.
Torrid affairs, parties, heartbreak, and homophobia swirl around a Philadelphia nightclub in this novel about pre-AIDS gay life.
Karl’s exuberant tale starts in 1976, when Joey, a 19-year-old from rural Pennsylvania, inherits an empty factory in Philadelphia and a tidy sum of money. Easing into Philly’s Center City “Gayborhood,” Joey turns the building into a gay disco called Sanctuary. The premises include a basement leather bar called The Hole, complete with a pitch-black orgy room, and an upstairs lesbian oasis called Aphrodite’s Lounge. Sanctuary frames the author’s exploration of the gay lifestyle when it was newly out but not yet widely accepted. Taking center stage is Joey’s happily nonmonogamous relationship with Henry, who manages Sanctuary and acts the stern dom to his partner’s tremulous sub in a rapturous BDSM dynamic. Surrounding them are hot young men, sugar daddies, drag queens, and some characters with their own subplots, including handsome bartenders Lonnie and BJ, the latter known for his enthusiastic fellatio; an unattractive, shunned sad sack who takes to stalking the alpha male DJ; two broke college graduates who act in a gay porn movie and then branch out into dancercise videos; a deeply closeted, homophobic gay man who gets arrested when he gives in to his urges in a restroom; and two transgender sex workers who provide each other a family while plying their risky trade. Karl’s energetic yarn is full of parties, wild outfits, dance-floor seductions, blithe boozing, and drug use—Quaaludes are Joey’s pills of choice—and lots of cheerfully explicit sex scenes. The author cuts the nostalgia with more subdued, even tragic scenes of the darker side of gay life: persistent loneliness; racial discrimination; and hints on the horizon of a nameless new disease. Karl’s prose captures the era’s campy fizz—“Oh Honey, you’re looking ultra fabuloso!”—while deftly evoking psychological depths beneath the glittering surface. (“He bought himself a beer, grabbing his change without leaving a tip, and made his way out to the dance floor,” he writes of a homeless drug addict. “An hour later, he was still dancing by himself, occasionally trying to act like he was dancing with someone, but never making any connections.”) The result is a richly textured take on gay life and loves.
An entertaining, poignant panorama of America’s gay scene in its heedless youth.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73651-812-0
Page Count: 247
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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