Terminal Velocity Paperback - 1998
by Blanche McCrary Boyd
Can a plantation-bred Southern girl find her destiny as a radical lesbian and sometime fugitive? In this wickedly transgressive new novel, Boyd follows the heroine of "The Revolution of Light" through the warped looking glass of the 1970s, with results that are by turns funny, sexy, and terrifying.
From the jacket flap
"In 1970 I realized that the Sixties were passing me by. I had never even smoked a joint, or slept with anyone besides my husband. A year later I had left Nicky, changed my name from Ellen to Rain, and moved to a radical lesbian commune in California named Red Moon Rising, where I was playing the Ten of Hearts in an outdoor production of Alice in Wonderland when two FBI agents arrived to arrest the Red Queen . . ."
So begins Blanche McCrary Boyd's brilliantly raucous account of self-styled feminist outlaws, their desperate adventures and extraordinary fates. Ellen, the narrator of Boyd's previous novel, The Revolution of Little Girls, this time pierces the heart of the sexual revolution in her quest to find a woman hero or--by default--to become one.
Ferociously paced, Terminal Velocity delineates six wonderfully engaging characters: Artemis Foote, for whom being rich, talented, and beautiful is a kind of game; Jordan, a messianic fugitive who becomes Ellen's lover; Amethyst Woman, a Marxist/Leninist dentist; Ross, a red-diaper baby and now a columnist for Ramparts; and Pearl, an art history professor turned hippie. At the center of this vortex is Ellen, prior to her transformation happily married and a rising young editor at a genteel publishing house in Boston. Together with these women, she is caught in the political and moral tailspin of the Sixties, living in a sexualized world-without-boundaries that leads them, eventually, to destruction, acceptance, and even redemption.
Deadpan funny and exquisitely moving, Terminal Velocity brings Boyd's lyricism, humor, and depth to material largely unexplored in American literature.
Details
- Title Terminal Velocity
- Author Blanche McCrary Boyd
- Binding Paperback
- Edition First Edition
- Pages 272
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, New York, New York, U.S.A.
- Date 1998-05-26
- ISBN 9780679750321 / 0679750320
- Weight 0.54 lbs (0.24 kg)
- Dimensions 8.1 x 5.24 x 0.72 in (20.57 x 13.31 x 1.83 cm)
-
Themes
- Cultural Region: South
- Sex & Gender: Lesbian
- Topical: Lgbt
- Library of Congress subjects Feminist fiction, Lesbians - United States - Fiction
- Dewey Decimal Code FIC
Media reviews
Citations
- New York Times, 06/28/1998, Page 28
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