The Book of Casey Adair – Ken Harvey (University of Wisconsin Press)

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University of Wisconsin Press

The Book of Casey Adair follows a young man’s passionate journey into the unknown where art, politics, life, and sexuality converge. Written in letters and journal entries against the backdrop of political turmoil at home and abroad, Violet Quill award-winning author Ken Harvey explores the emotional barriers within Casey’s orbit following the anniversary of his father’s death. The symbolism of longing for liberation from the tyranny of dictatorship and homophobia anchors the work. Rarely does an epistolary novel of such magnitude and grace delve so deeply into the conundrum of relationships and parallel the alienation and desperation to counter threats to democracy and end discrimination. All of which makes this work so topical today.

The novel spans the first half of the 80s from Vermont to Madrid, Boston to New York and Toronto. Rendezvous with activists, actors and artists, correspondence with alumni, troubled relations with his best friend Poppy and candid journal entries speak to the political and social upheaval of the times. Casey arrives in Madrid to study theater arts on a foundation grant. His humble digs in a boarding house lead to encounters with pro-democracy activist and doctoral candidate Gustavo. Colorful characters, including an accordion playing, Franco sympathizer who comes to his defense when civil guards detain him in a park and escort him home, populate the boarding house. Imbued with a rich cultural heritage, Madrid is a character, too.

He joins his first protest that turns violent, falls for a hustler named Octavio, is outed and confronted by his roommate, parties at a prominent expat’s and connects with a theater director who invites him to try out for a major play. As his faith in religion wanes, despite his upbringing, he feels untethered and Poppy arrives to commiserate. In equal measure, their disillusionment unites them in an unexpected and troubling way as an attempted fascist coup takes place. What transpires next completely jeopardizes the relationship and demands of him a seemingly insurmountable obstacle that alters his life irrevocably.

On his circuitous route to self-discovery, he navigates virulent discrimination prior to and during the terrifying AIDS crisis.  Back in Toronto, cops are busting the baths and brutally arresting gay men. President Reagan is elected in the U.S. and dismisses the crisis which claims thousands of lives, impacting Casey personally. As he begins to fully engage in gay life, alternating between the desire to be free and the obligation to accept new roles, he takes a job at a Boston boarding school, rife with a homophobic headmaster, joins a protest in New York and stages his own theatrical coup that exacts a price he’s willing to pay. He meets and struggles to embrace a relationship with a British library researcher. Meanwhile the clarion call for familial responsibility, roiling beneath the surface, emerges and he’s confronted by the need to balance life between career ambitions, family, love and the fight for gay rights.

 What’s striking is how the work goes beyond the pursuit of love and identity into the intricacies of learning how to love. Emotions begin to clarify as expectations disappear, revealing the known as well as the unknown. As Casey observes a partially chiseled 25 B.C. sculpture of a satyr on a second visit to Madrid, Harvey writes, “the contours of who we are…started to become clear but it’ll take a while before the details emerge.” By staging emotional fidelity against the mise en scene of anarchy, the novel resonates on multiple levels. One informs the other, strengthens and reinforces the fact that the personal is indeed political. While the work captures the zeitgeist of the times, it echoes far and wide in today’s tempestuous global society.

Reviewed by Melanie Mitzner

Ghost Light Burn (The Maverick Heart Cycle, Book 4) – Stephen Graham King (Renaissance Press)

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I really love the Maverick Heart cycle. It’s everything I look for in speculative fiction: different worlds, camaraderie, action scenes, banter, action scenes, deep characters, action scenes, and interesting situations. Did I mention action scenes? Because there are a lot of them here–chases, tight squeezes, and impossible feats of derring-do–but King draws it all together into a fast-paced whole and makes it real.

Ghost Light Burn picks up where the last book, A Congress of Ships, left off. Spacer Keene’s life partner, Ember, has healed nicely from the injuries he incurred, leaving him with lots of technologically advanced prosthetics, and his work partner, dazzling Lexa-Blue, is also along for the ride as they travel the Galactum with Vrick, both a ship and a sentient life form. Ember gets a distress call from his old partner-in-crime, Malika, who has retired from their scams and gone back to her previous profession–acting. Now a member of a traveling theatre group, Malika has been alerted by her girlfriend to a problem on the mining planet of Fury, where said girlfriend works. Fury is being broken apart and mined for resources, but someone on its smaller administrative planet, Sound, is siphoning off the miners’ bonuses. Malika’s girlfriend’s efforts to investigate have been futile, but Malika knows her friends Keene, Ember, Lexa-Blue, and Vrick can find out who’s behind it and put a stop to the theft.

If this sounds complicated, it’s not. Just start at the beginning as King gets you on the coaster and it pulls out of the station. What follows is a wild ride filled with indelible supporting characters, inventive-as-hell technology, and a heartfelt depiction of the symbiosis between man and machine. And it’s tough to tell where one of those leaves off and another begins. King invests the spaceship Vrick with more personality than some writers give their human characters.

Although King shines in both building character and creating exciting action scenes, his melding of the two is pure magic. And just when a tech explanation starts to get too detailed, he reins it in by either having Vrick come up with an easily understood metaphor or by dropping in some fast characterization like the banter between Keene and Lexa-Blue. In this respect, his pacing is masterful.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one of my favorite scenes, which has Ember in front of the mirror ruminating over not only his state of the art prosthetic devices but freely admitting the PTSD they’ve brought about. His vulnerability here is a marked contrast to the face he shows not only Keene but the rest of the world. It’s a singular, deeply moving scene that brings Ember alive and puts his humorous asides and exchanges with his comrades in a totally different light.

Although Ghost Light Burn (a ghost light, for those not familiar with the theatre, is the safety light that shines on stage when everyone is gone) is the latest in the Maverick Heart series, it definitely works as a standalone. However, you’ll be doing yourself a favor buying all of them at some point. Yes, they’re that good. Highly recommended.

JW

© 2022 Jerry L. Wheeler

Sashay to the Centre of the Earth – Chris McCrudden (Farrago Books)

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Farrago Books

Upon reading the title of Chris Crudden’s latest sci fi book, one might expect a story about drag queens in a Jules Verne-style adventure. It’s comedy of the campy variety for sure, but in lieu of drag queens, Crudden envisions a future inhabited by sassy sentient machines and beleaguered humans, both trying to head off a war for control of the universe. Something like Terminator meets the BBC’s Are You Being Served? if it was written by Douglas Adams. Sorry. That’s the best I can do.

I may do even worse trying to summarize the plot, and none of this is a bad thing by the way. At least for those of us who enjoy well-played adolescent humor. It’s Year 10,000 and something. Machines, from toasters to nanobots, have evolved into artificially intelligent beings, and the universe teeters on a tenuous peace accord that liberated humans from indentured servitude. Earth has been ‘remodeled’ for android habitation. Oceans have been paved over with concrete since metal doesn’t mix well with saltwater. A human cast of characters lives on the Battlestar Suburbia, which is something of a wasteland of its own. Algae is the only food source, and try as they might to process it into familiar things like hot dogs and champagne, it still tastes like algae.

Prime Minister Fuji Itsu, a printer, is determined to maintain the detente she brokered, but there’s mutiny brewing among machine-kind. Her greedy political rival Carin Parkeon, a parking meter, would like to exploit the machines’ distrust of humans and catapult Fuji from power. Meanwhile, on the Battlestar Suburbia, the grand opening of a mega supermarket, appropriately named ALGI, turns out to be a Trojan horse with potentially genocidal consequences for humans. Their leader Janice, a former low-budget hairstylist, and her partner Rita must figure out agriculture in outer space, and more immediately, how to defuse a hostile, laser-powered grocery store.

Additional rotating characters include a secret agent automaton, Pamasonic, who would prefer her former life as a simple breadmaker with dreams of settling down with a special somebody and wiring together some little ones. Her partner in crime, Hugh, is an excitable smartphone, still stinging from an affair gone wrong with Carin’s henchman Alexy, a home speaker. Then there’s the gals and guys of Battlestar Suburbia’s Kurl Up and Dye salon. They’ve been smuggling in soil to grow fruits and vegetables and become enlisted in Janice’s mission to create a palatable, organic food source for her people and end dependence on the machines.

The “science” of Crudden’s sci fi epic is hard to follow, but one grows to appreciate that’s besides the point. Sentient machines have consciousness that they can transfer to

multiple inert hosts, and they’re as fallible and paradoxical as humans. Beyond their tendency to fall back on keystroke emojis, one has a hard time telling machine characters from human ones. The machines certainly display a full range of emotions and sensibilities, from smugness, cowardice, irony, to ethical obligation.

Crudden’s humorously absurd world helps with letting go of how any of this is possible, and he makes clever reference to modern problems like social media obsession and climate crisis. His rotating ensemble of misfits encounter mischievous LOLCats, somehow gone from meme to real world entities. They discover non-biodegradable plastic rendered sentient from the toxic, primordial goop that is now Earth’s polluted oceans. Despite the ridiculousness of walking, talking electric mixers and petulant cellular phones, one never feels too far aloft from the world we know.

Crudden has also crafted a story that is unmistakably queer without depicting queerness directly, for the most part. Janice and Rita’s relationship is acknowledged, but they’re in separate places in the universe throughout the book. Hugh and Alexy have a hammed-up moment of reconciliation, but at the risk of giving away too much, their USB ports never connect. What makes the story queer is the characterization and sensibility. In the midst of a struggle to save the universe, every character, from hard luck human to discarded twentieth century ballpoint pen just wants to be seen. Happily, they each get their moment to shine, however absurdly.

A fun read for fans of sci fi/fantasy humor in the vein of Terry Gilliam, and more recently Rob Rosen and Ryan LaSala.

Reviewed by Andrew J. Peters

That Boy of Yours Wants Looking At – Simon Smalley (Butterworth Books)

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What do you do with a well-written, engaging, enjoyable book whose main character’s life experience runs counter to not only yours but that of nearly every queer person you’ve ever met? That’s my only problem with Simon Smalley’s memoir, That Boy of Yours Wants Looking At.

Growing up in Nottingham in the late Sixties/early Seventies was a rough go economically for Smalley’s parents and his five siblings, but his father, Sid, had a decent job as an industrial photographer who did weddings and the like on the side. Smalley’s recollections are quite detailed, almost as if he’d been taking notes on his childhood, but Smalley explains this by way of a short introduction to the book where he states he has hyperthymesia, or an ability to recount his experiences with exhaustive detail. And there’s no question that it’s served him well here. He seems to have no difficulty recalling entire conversations verbatim.

As a boy, Smalley made no attempt to hide or disguise his rejection of traditionally masculine toys such as footballs or soccer paraphernalia or cowboy outfits. Smalley’s preferred Christmas and birthday presents were toy sewing and washing machines, velvet, jewelly baubles, and similar items that would have gotten me and most of the queer men I know thrown out of the house. Smalley’s parents, however, willingly indulged him despite, one assumes from the title, the opinions of others. His siblings may have been confused by him, but they were ultimately supportive.

After his mother, Betty, died, I held my breath, convinced that his father would put a halt to such nonsense and attempt to turn him away from velvet and lace, but I was wrong. He encouraged the boy’s love of androgynous glam rockers like Marc Bolan, David Bowie, and the like. No whim went unsatisfied when it came to haircuts, clothes, or music. Needless to say, coming from a father whose sole advice regarding life and sexuality was: “Never hit a woman in the breasts or the crotch,” I was stunned.

So, what’s wrong with a childhood without relentlessly toxic masculinity? Absolutely nothing. But it’s so far removed from my own experience and that of so many men of my generation, it’s jaw-dropping. And for me, it was narrative-stopping at times. I occasionally had to put the book down and wonder how such treatment would have made my life easier. But your reaction may be different. A good friend of mine also read it, and when I mentioned this issue, he said, “I know, but I decided not to let it bother me.”

The point, however, is a minor one, mostly overridden by Smalley’s excellent writing and ability to keep his readers’ attention. Perhaps it’s even a case of jealousy on my part. Again, you might feel differently. Either way, you’ll find much to like in That Boy of Yours Wants Looking At. It’s witty, wise, and totally affirming. Let his parents serve as an example rather than an exception.

JW

© 2022 Jerry L. Wheeler

Faux Queen: A Life In Drag – Monique Jenkinson (Amble Press)

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Amble Press

Monique Jenkinson, the alter ego of Fauxnique, is an artist, performer, and choreographer whose solo performance works have toured nationally and internationally in such diverse places as nightclubs, theaters, and museums: with her work she examines the performance of femininity as a powerful, vulnerable, and subversive act. She may now add memoirist to her curricula vitae. Faux Queen: A Life in Drag chronicles her life as a drag artist, beginning with her first attempt in the summer of 1998 (dressed as a Mormon missionary lip-syncing “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by the Beach Boys) to her triumphant win as Miss Trannyshack 2003 (the first cis-woman ever to win a major drag queen pageant). And just to be clear: Fauxnique is not a drag king, nor is she a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman (à la Victor/Victoria), but a cis-woman performing drag as a woman.

Of course, Fauxnique’s journey into the drag world began long before she ever walked onto the eight-by-ten stage of the Trannyshack, first with her Halloween costumes as a small child, through the brutal world of ballet, her discovery of the gender-bending and -blurring artists of 80s music, until her status of outsider was cemented when her parents moved from California to small-town Colorado. Each of these influences would come into play when, as an adult, she would enter the world of drag. And like all good memoirs, her story freely drops names (okay, Peaches Christ may not be quite the household name that RuPaul is, but Fauxnique does include appearances by a lot of San Francisco drag royalty).

In addition to all the dishy details, Fauxnique exposes one central truth, something that every woman, and every drag performer (regardless of persuasion) knows: Gender is performance. (This tenet is just as true for Monique, a cis-woman, acting as a woman, as it is for any male drag queen, or female drag, or non-binary drag monarch.) Moreover, as a corollary, she demonstrates another truth that should be just as self-evident: Drag is a lot of work. In other words, You have to work at it to werq it. A great deal of thought occurs before a performance, as Fauxnique explains at great length: she includes several examples of her drag numbers, providing comprehensive descriptions of costume, make-up, music, props, as well as all the preparation and rehearsal that happens beforehand. Drag is definitely in the details.

In addition to being a fun read about an interesting life, Fauxnique manages to be both educating and thought-provoking: she certainly taught this cis-male reviewer hitherto unknown aspects of drag, both back- and front-stage. Never condescending of her drag sisters, Fauxnique knows full well that she is a cis-woman in a world that traditionally only included cis-men. She shows how something as illusory as drag can reveal deeper truths, and thereby elevates Drag to the status of Art. Her unique position also give her valuable insights into gender and feminism, which she communicates in an accessible way. A recent season of RuPaul’s Drag Race included two trans people and a straight cis-man as contestants; when the latter entry was criticized, a Drag Race star retorted, “Drag is for everyone.” Fauxnique would agree.

Reviewed by Keith John Glaeske

Saints & Sinners: New Fiction from the Festival 2022 – Ed. by Tracy Cunningham and Paul J. Willis (Rebel Satori Press)

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Rebel Satori Press

I was a regular attendee of the marvelous queer lit conference, Saints & Sinners, for a good fifteen years. I took a short break, but then the pandemic came along and my break was far longer than I’d intended it to be. This year, however, marked my return to New Orleans, and it was a delight to see faces old and new and feel the energy once again. And one of the features of S&S is their fiction contest, judged each year by a different queer author. This year it was Martin Hyatt (author of A Scarecrow’s Bible and Beautiful Gravity among others), who chose some magnificent pieces.

Even the best short story anthology, however, won’t connect with every reader all the time, and there are some pieces here which didn’t do anything for me. Other readers might find them brilliant, of course. That’s just the nature of collections, and I’ll say that the stories range all over the place, from heavily plotted to fleshed-out character sketches.

The collection starts off strong with an interesting piece by Colin Lacy, “An Ephemeral Eye,” which has easily the most bizarre premise in the book. A lifelong fan of a rock star named Adam Sterling buys Sterling’s eye, which the rocker has removed and saved for the fan. As the fan consumes the organ, he has flashbacks of Sterling’s life with each piece of the eye he eats. That he does so in front of the retired and now one-eyed singer does not lessen the creepiness, but once you get beyond that, the story turns into a fascinating rumination on celebrity, those who chase it, and those who attain it.

The only difficulty in starting out with a story this oddly powerful is following it. Despite the title of the next story, Kat Lewis’s “Eat You Whole,” it’s positively prosaic alongside its predecessor. The effect of Lacy’s story really doesn’t wear off until J.R. Greenwell’s “Bucktooth Becky,” a charming tale of a girl and her gay best friend and what happens when a Catholic grade school teacher comes to a largely Baptist smalltown.

Once the taste of the eye is out of your mouth, there’s much here to occupy your attention. The winner of the contest, J Duncan Davidson’s “My Elijah” is an atmospheric story set in a logging camp and deals with the accidental death of the lead character’s saw partner, Elijah, who was also his romantic interest. I also liked Gar McVey-Russell’s “The Necklace,” set in 1990s East Oakland, a tale of preacher sin and boyhood redemption as slim, slight protagonist AJ must cope with Pastor Blade’s advances while taking comfort in the memory of his first love and protector, Kenny, killed by gang gunfire. As heartbreaking as it is uplifting, Russell’s story has indelible characters who speak in dialogue that fairly crackles. And William Christy Smith’s “Free Pizza for Life,” the story of a New Orleans drag queen who wins a pizzeria’s promotional contest, has extraordinary heart and wit and maybe my favorite line in the whole damn book: “I don’t know why anyone would ever think twice about Marilyn Monroe as long as Dusty Springfield is around.”

But most on the money for me (your mileage may vary) is Eric Peterson’s “Little Boy Blue,” an emotional story about a man going back to Savannah for the funeral of his aunt, Willa Jean, who took him in when his father threw him out for being gay. As he negotiates the tricky pathways of family and grief, the latter is ameliorated by the overflow crowd at the funeral home, mostly gay men his aunt had also taken in and nurtured when their families abandoned them. Though that’s a bit of a spoiler, I can guarantee a tear will still come to your eye by the end. I actually read this twice (and cried both times).

So, there you have it. As with most anthologies, this has high and low points, but the best stories are memorable indeed. I can hardly wait for the next volume.

JW

© 2022 Jerry L. Wheeler

George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye – Allen Ellenzweig (Oxford University Press)

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Oxford University Press

Allen Ellenzweig’s biography George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye is a monumental feat of research. It runs 600 pages, and 100 pages of those are notes, and the notes are just as sexy, insightful, and thorough as the rest of the book. You know a biography is going to remain a favorite when it includes authoritative and sassy lines in the notes like, “There are conflicting accounts as to whether George Platt Lynes or Lincoln Kirstein was the more desired source of sexual gratification for Berkshire’s athletes.”

Lynes was a male beauty of the 1920s who hustled himself into Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris and entered the relationship between novelist Glenway Wescott and his lover Monroe Wheeler without ever quite breaking them up. Their very unusual Lost Generation ménage à trois was tantalizingly covered in the 1998 book When We Were Three, which is now a collector’s item and includes all kinds of alluring photos of this trio, some or most taken by Lynes, who became a notable photographer in the 1930s and ‘40s.

Lynes took fashion photographs and he also took shots of major literary figures like Thomas Mann and André Gide and movie stars like Katharine Hepburn and Lillian Gish, and these photos are sensitive and intuitive and worthy of attention. But his secret photos of male nudes comprise a body of work that has gotten Lynes intermittent attention for the last 30 years or so. The bodies on display in his nude photos are often discreetly molded by shadows, which gives them an air of secrecy, but Lynes also knew how to flood his frame with heavenly light when observing great beauties like Bill Harris or the ballet dancer Erik Bruhn.

A Lynes photo of Harris’s lover Jack Fontan, who was the so-called “naked sailor” in ultra-tight shorts on stage in South Pacific, plays on Fontan’s image by having him pose in white jockey shorts and shirt in front of a bank of clouds, like something from a dream. A 1938 Lynes photo of the writer Frederic Prokosch sprawled on the floor with his thick legs bent is erotic because it is seemingly very direct yet stylized due to the lighting and the dramatic seesaw-like composition. In an era when men and women take often-dazzling nude selfies and blast them out all over the place in an instant, the carefully enclosed world of Lynes and his group of friends and colleagues does seem very old-fashioned, but this is partly what makes it still so potent, for their palpable breaking of rules is erotic; if there are no rules to break then so much of eroticism evaporates.

There are photos of Wescott’s blond and magnetically taciturn brother Lloyd in When We Were Three that look very intimate, and in Ellenzweig’s book we find out that Lynes seduced Lloyd once and actually lived with him in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan in the early 1930s, and Wescott put up with even this transgression, for he was attracted to Lynes and he also had the patience of a saint. Lloyd was heterosexual, and he eventually married the heiress Barbara Harrison, who helped Wescott and Lynes out with money when they were in need. But after Lynes’s father died, Lloyd slept with him again just to be kind and consolatory and was “passionate and tender,” according to Lynes. Lynes himself had an affair with a female model, so sexual boundaries in this milieu could be appealingly open and flexible.

Lynes’s hair started to turn prematurely white while he was still in his twenties, and though this was visually striking it also seemed to mark him as someone who wasn’t going to live a long time. Ellenzweig patiently details Lynes’s difficult relationship with his brother Russell, who was too often called upon to bail his sibling out of financial difficulties, and he never makes the classic biographer’s mistake of being judgmental of Lynes, who had a fairly bad character in general. Lynes comes across as brittle and calculating and selfish throughout, yet it is very difficult to dislike him, even when Ellenzweig explores his anti-Semitism and the way it marred many people in his circle, including his beloved Monroe Wheeler. By contrast, Wescott is described in this book reacting very strongly against a younger lover who makes an anti-Semitic remark. Wescott is always the most appealing and lovable of the trio in any iteration of this story, yet he was often the one who was the odd man out in their triangular love affair.

Ellenzweig shows how prejudice finally destroyed the ménage à trois that had begun in the late 1920s when Lynes leaves their shared apartment in 1943 partly because Wheeler was threatened with dismissal from his job at the Museum of Modern Art. After that Lynes made a misguided attempt to set himself up in Hollywood and an even more misguided attempt to woo the young Don Bachardy away from Christopher Isherwood via anguished love letters in the mid-1950s. Bachardy was intrigued, but he was savvy enough to know that what he had with Isherwood was the real thing whereas his single sexual encounter with the feckless Lynes was transitory. Ellenzweig spent many years researching his Lynes book, and his energy and enthusiasm for his subject never flag. He is a tireless scholar, but he is also an insightful critic who can do a close read of any of the Lynes photos printed in the book and make you understand them more intimately. I read George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye slowly because I didn’t want it to end. This is a significant and painstaking and immersive book, shining a light on all aspects of a very flawed man who himself was one of the first artists to shine a light on the beauty of the male form in photographs.

Reviewed by Dan Callahan

Dear Miss Cushman – Paula Martinac (Bywater Books)

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Bywater Books

Although I love historical fiction, sometimes anachronisms slip in and ruin the mood for me. This happened recently in a detective novel that took place in the 1930s but featured such concepts as “journaling” and had the main character wearing a backpack to school. I threw the book aside and went on to something else. Bywater’s Paula Martinac wouldn’t have made such a misstep. Her latest, Dear Miss Cushman, is a completely engaging and thoroughly researched trip into 1850s Manhattan that takes time to get the details right.

Eighteen-year-old Georgiana Cartwright is the daughter of an established actor who ends up drunk and disorderly in front of an audience and leaves town in disgrace, bringing shame upon the family–especially difficult since Georgiana has aspirations to the stage herself. She wants to play men’s roles (“breeches parts”) like her heroine, Charlotte Cushman. Hiding her true identity, Georgie is hired as a supporting actress by a stock company, and it appears all her dreams will come true until she’s sexually harassed by a member of the company. Nevertheless, she gets an opportunity to play Shakespeare as a man. But then her father shows up and her true identity is revealed, endangering her goals–including a relationship with Clementine, a budding writer also in the stock company.

As with most romances, the conclusion is nearly foregone, but the real delight of the book is how Martinac gets us there. And although the romance is important here, it’s not primary. Georgie is career-oriented, and she never lets anyone forget that. Her triumphs over the male-dominated industry get the well-deserved focus, and Martinac squeezes every last relatable drop out of these successes. She has a real gift for putting the reader right in the middle of the situation and letting the variables play themselves out, never seeming contrived or manipulated from above.

She also has a gift for creating strong, interesting characters to work through those situations. Georgie is of a piece with Gen Rider in last year’s Testimony – a woman who knows exactly who she is, what she wants, and how to accomplish that. The difference between the two is that Professor Rider, being accused of sexual improprieties with a student, is put in a defensive position whereas Georgie operates from a position of strength at the box office. Georgie has moments where she’s vulnerable, especially with Clementine, but her self-reliance always triumphs.

And then we have the historical aspect, which is as rich, detailed, and atmospheric as Testimony’s mid-Fifties was tense and claustrophobic. Again, Martinac has a knack for drawing together telling historical details to form a whole in which you can lose yourself. She makes it look easy, a sure indicator that it’s not.

Dear Miss Cushman is an absolute delight, parading its strong characters through an eminently relatable plot and basking in your applause. Put your hands together for this one, folks.

JW

© 2022 Jerry L. Wheeler