Michael Tolliver Lives is a touching novel with a cast of unforgettable characters. Michael himself is fifty-five years old and happily married to his much younger partner, Ben. It seems like life is on a good streak for Michael. He is happy and thanks to the AIDS-cocktail, his battle agaist HIV is going great.

Then comes a phone call from his family in Florida. His brother Irwin informs him that he should think about coming home to see his mother, as she is seriously sick. The idea doesn't go over too well. Michael isn't sure he wants to deal with his family who are fundamentalists and have never been really accepting of his life choices.

He would much rather stay in San Francisco, working on his freelance gardener business and sharing his time with his logical family as Anna calls them. Anna Madrigal is a darling woman who you can't help but adore. She smokes pot and has a genuine love for life which seeps from the pages. Brian Hawkins is a down to earth guy who has overcome so much and has been a steadfast friend for Michael through the years. He shares his life with his daughter Shawna as they both lives their lives under a shadow, cast by the leaving of Shawna's mother so many years ago.

When Michael and Ben finally go to Florida, so begins a truly heartwarming tale of friendship, love, loss, forgiveness, trust and more. Still more characters are introduced - my favourite being Patreese, a gay hairdresser who just lights up the pages with his personality. It's written in a revealing and oftentimes comical way which seems to make the darker subjects contained within the novel, so much lighter and easier to take.

What I loved most about this book, is the fact that it shows so clearly the love between two men in a truly positive light.

I have seen reviews with sexual content warnings and sure enough, there is sexual content within the pages of this novel. However - to me at least - it's tastefully done and doesn't take away from the novel at all.

It's a fantastic book and though I haven't read any of the original Barbary Lane novels containing this character, I know I shall be looking them up at some point. It is important to note though, that this book, while containing many of the same characters from the Tales of the City Series, is not a sequel. If you go into this book knowing that, you will enjoy it so much more.

Author's website: http://www.armisteadmaupin.com/

Author's blog: http://www.armisteadmaupin.com/blog/ ( )

Nice to meet you again, Michael. And even better that you brought your friends from the past. Great to see that somebody masters life with humour, elegance and style; being hiv+ and still witty and optimistic shows how strong Michael Tolliver is or has become. After the years in Barbary Lane we meet him again, happily married and surrounded by friends, but challenged by the clichees of gay life. Fortunately Maupin succeeds to avoid dull moments or over the top stereotypes, although the ones he tends to use are just very funny. But the insights you see and read in this book just show you that there can be a bright future ahead. ( )

It’s been nearly twenty years since the last installment in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, about the intertwined lives of Michael “Mouse” Tolliver and his friends and lovers in San Francisco. Tales begins with the arrival of Mouse, a fresh-faced young gay man from Orlando, at the apartment building run by the colorful and eccentric Anna Madrigal in the mid-1970s. In the ensuing six books Maupin chronicles Mouse’s life through the decades that follow, incorporating current events such as the Jim Jones massacre and the rise of AIDS. Although part of the Tales series, Maupin’s latest book is a standalone novel, with enough background given for each character that new readers won’t feel lost.

Lives takes place in the present day, and like the previous books shows how the wider culture that we live in affects our own lives, and how the political really is personal. Michael, HIV-positive and not expected to survive long at the end of the previous novel Sure of You, is now 55 and still alive thanks to new antiretroviral drugs and now facing the reality of growing old despite the virus. He’s found love again, this time with a man fully 25 years his junior, and was even married at San Francisco City Hall. Through Michael we learn the fate of all the characters in the previous Tales books, and learn that life does go on for all of us.

Michael’s father never appears in this novel – he has passed away from prostate cancer – yet his influence still pervades Michael’s life. It overshadows Michael’s relationship with his dying mother and his straight Christian brother, and pervades everything from Michael’s feelings towards his sissy nephew to his marriage to a much younger man. Though not apparent on the surface, part of the story of Lives is about how a father’s influence can last our whole lives – for good or ill – and what it takes for us to step out from under it. Lives also tells the story of Michael’s old friend Brian, now a single father and still an aging hippie who’s raised a bleeding-edge postmodern daughter now taking her first steps to independence. This is not only a book about growing older, but also a meditation on the roles that fathers play in our lives and how critical they are in shaping who we become.

(Please be aware that this book does contain scenes of sexuality that, while not excessively graphic, may not be appropriate for all readers) Reviewed by Book Dads ( )

It took me a long time to decide that I was curious enough to read this book - I love Tales of the City and wasn't sure anything new could live up to it. And I can now see I was right to hesitate - the feeling of things being all wrong stayed with me from the first page until the last.

First-person narration by Michael never quite felt right - I suppose he's just one of those characters that I just can't see as first-person narrators. Furthermore, having Michael as a narrator diminished the role of the other characters I loved - those still left. A Tales of the City book without insights into Mrs Madrigal's mind is not a proper Tales of the City to me.

There were some amusing passages but on the whole the book just irritated me - where did Michael's brother come from? And I missed Mona and Thack and even Jon who's not even in the last three of the original six. ( )

July 2008: http://www.3rsblog.com/2008/07/book-t... ( )