Genre: Lesfic
LGBTQ+ Category: Lesbian
Reviewer: J. Comer
Publisher | Amazon | Universal Buy Link
Goodreads
About The Book
“Rowdy” Randy Cox, a woman staring down the barrel of retirement, is a curmudgeonly blue-collar butch lesbian, who has been single for twenty years and is trying to date again.
At the end of a long, exhausting shift, Randy finds her supervisor, Bryant, pinned and near death at the warehouse where they work. Upon the news of his death, she battles to find a balance between the joys of an exciting new relationship and the struggles of processing her supervisor’s unexpected passing.
The manner of her supervisor’s death leaves Randy unsettled and suspicious as she gets sucked into both a criminal investigation led by the police and an administrative investigation conducted by her employer.
As Randy seeks the truth, trust erodes, key friendships are strengthened, and more loss awaits her.
The Review
Lesbian literature, like love, is a many-splendored thing. Whether you date its emergence to Radcliffe Hall, Sheridan Le Fanu, or Sappho herself[1], the term stretches widely to accommodate a scattered realm of texts dealing in one way or another with love and sex between women. In Pinned, a Northern California writer examines themes that go back to the ancient Greeks with the careful eye that she brings to all human endeavors.
We meet Randy (“Miranda”) Cox, an aging working-class butch who works in a warehouse and owns a cat. She is tough and strong, loves beer and barbeque, able to rescue a drowning friend, and tender toward a fellow worker killed in an industrial accident. Her world is rigorously rendered, an industrial wreckscape in the Cheyne-Stokes breathing of capitalism.
It’s noteworthy that Faraim builds a connected world amongst her novels: Bear, and Vivian (from Canopy), appear in this novel as well, and along with Randy, love to ride, much as Faraim tells this reviewer she once did. The dark mystery around the coworker’s death deepens, with sexual harassment and violence while Randy grows fonder of the lovely and gentle Kristen, and deeper in her friendship with trans pal Darcy. The ending is sadness, but not tragedy; more adventures await for Randy, surely.
This novel was much better constructed than Canopy, which felt like slice-of-life interlarded with crime tale. Here the plot moves along and we get a lot of Randy’s world, but the crime (or was it?) slowly unfolds, until finally we know all (or do we?) Enjoyable, very realistic, and recommended.
I was pleased by this book and will be reading more of Faraim’s work.
[1] Or Patricia Highsmith, who wrote the first lesbian novel with a happy ending.
The Reviewer
J. Comer is a writer and teacher who lives in Northern California.
