Christine Snow is a successful therapist with a full professional schedule, a new house, a dog, and a live-in companion she adores. These seemingly mundane details cement together a life lived on the margins: Chris is lesbian in a mostly straight world, responsible but burdened with fallout from a wildly dysfunctional family, settled but with a recent history of promiscuity and excess. When Taylor, the love of her life, disappears suddenly, leaving no clues except photos of an exotic stranger, Chris's hard-won middle way implodes. Her frantic search for Taylor takes her from Chicago's lesbian social scene to Morocco and on a psychological odyssey as necessary as it is painful. With its heady mix of suspense and humor, edgy urban ambience, and down-to-earth, touching characters, this second novel from the author of the award-winning Aquamarine (LJ 3/15/96) will not disappoint. Recommended.Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, Va.
A pleasantly ambiguous psychological-suspense novel from Anshaw (the award-winning Aquamarine, 1991), who shows us once again that a good story can be told as much by what it holds back as by what it offers.
When Christine Snow's girlfriend Taylor disappears without a trace one morning, Christine is at first reluctant to panic. This has more to do with Christine than with Taylor: Like all good psychotherapists, Christine has been trained to let problems reveal themselves slowly and with a minimum of overt speculation, and this emotional reticence will itself provide the best clue to Taylor's fate. "Making love with women," Christine says, "is the easiest thing for me to do with them. Everything else leaps so quickly into difficult and complicated." This attitude has assured her many friends but few mates over the years, and for a long time she pretends not to mind Taylor's absence. Eventually, though, she realizes that her independence is less complete than she imagines and, once she sees this, she takes on the task of finding Taylor. This finally carries Christine as far as Morocco, where Taylor had lived for some time under the influence of a strange religious visionary and the motley coterie that encircled her. Taylor's story, like all good mysteries, becomes murkier and more troubling as it proceeds, and Christine eventually discovers that she is looking for quite a different woman than the one she thought she knew—which, in turn, suggests that a similar reorientation of Christine's own personality may be in store. By the time we arrive at the last chapter, we find that the loose ends and ambiguities are beside the point, and it isn't troubling to find them unresolved. The real skill of Anshaw's narrative is that it makes the reader understand and appreciate Christine's changing perceptions at every stage of the action.
Clever, well-crafted, and deft: Anshaw draws her characters with an unsparing hand that is guided by a remarkably sympathetic eye.
