Greetings from Jamaica, Wish You Were Queer, by Mari SanGiovanni.
Bywater Books, 264 pages, $13.95 paper ISBN#978-1932859300
Marie is the black sheep of her lovingly dysfunctional Italian family. She's a dyke, and her old-school parents disapprove. She's an unfulfilled, poverty-stricken screenwriter. She's trapped in a rotten relationship with a self-centered lover who brings other women home. And she's melodramatically obsessed with - she stalks, in fact - an apparently unattainable Hollywood
starlet. Life sucks - until her cranky grandmother dies, unexpectedly leaving Marie her millions.
Emotional slapstick ensues, as family members vie for Marie's favor, and the heiress tries to buy them off with a chaotic all-expenses paid holiday at a Jamaican resort - an exercise in hyperbolic hysteria that only intensifies when the Hollywood actress arrives for her own holiday getaway.
starlet. Life sucks - until her cranky grandmother dies, unexpectedly leaving Marie her millions.
Emotional slapstick ensues, as family members vie for Marie's favor, and the heiress tries to buy them off with a chaotic all-expenses paid holiday at a Jamaican resort - an exercise in hyperbolic hysteria that only intensifies when the Hollywood actress arrives for her own holiday getaway.
SanGiovanni's capably comic first novel - runner-up in a Bywater Books fiction contest - artfully folds ethnic-Italian humor (lots of shouting, and meatballs are a motif) into a happily-ever-after lesbian romance.
Mari will be a guest on Writers in the Sky Podcast in November 2007 Listen to a sneak preview here: http://www.audioacrobat.com/play/WNnCJxBX
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