Riverfinger Women
by Elana Nachman/Dykewomon
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Award-winning author Elana Dykewomon's "wonderful" debut novel about lesbian life in America during the social upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Adrienne Rich). Written when she was just twenty-four years old, Riverfinger Women is Elana Dykewomon's beloved, intimate coming-of-age novel about Inez and her circle of friends--the Riverfinger women--struggling to find themselves amid the changing social mores of the Civil Rights era. Inez has known she was a lesbian since show more childhood, and while moving between Highland, her boarding school, and her friends' Greenwich Village apartment, she experiences longing and disappointment, friendship and romance, and her first real relationship, with schoolmate Abby. Along with their experimental and outgoing friend Peggy, Inez and Abby graduate from Highland and move into adulthood, confronting the prejudices of the larger world as they go. Told in an engrossing interweaving narrative, Riverfinger Women explores the characters' brushes with sexual violence, prostitution, drugs, love, and, ultimately, happiness amid the thrills and challenges of lesbian life during the second women's liberation movement. Originally published in 1974, this groundbreaking novel was honored with the 2018 Lee Lynch Classic Award. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Flashback Friday: Young, wild and lesbian
Riverfinger Women: A Novel by Elana Dykewomon (Open Road Media, $14.99, ebook)
Open Road Media has been releasing a number of LGBTQ classics as ebooks, but this one really caught my eye. I’m so old that the first copy of this book I bought still had the author listed as Elana Nachman, rather than by the name she took in 1976, Elana Dykewomon.
Originally published by Daughters, Inc., a feminist press, in 1974, Riverfinger Women deals with a young woman’s coming to understand her sexual identity in—of course—the ’60s and ’70s.
It wasn’t all peace and love. Inez Riverfinger, Abby, Peggy, Rainbo Woman and Lucy Bear all come with their own stories and their own experiences with oppression show more and violence. What makes Riverfinger Women stand out, though, is the happy ending. The “lesbian novel” of the time almost always had women punished for daring to reject the trappings of the male-dominated world.
Riverfinger Women is also interesting for its use of notes, letters, posters, and other ephemera as a way to carry the narrative forward. Don’t mistake the value here as completely historical: Riverfinger Women is a rousing good story, flush with poetic language.
(Published on Lit/Rant on 2/28/2014: http://litrant.tumblr.com/post/78100703985/flashback-friday-young-wild-and-lesbi... show less
Riverfinger Women: A Novel by Elana Dykewomon (Open Road Media, $14.99, ebook)
Open Road Media has been releasing a number of LGBTQ classics as ebooks, but this one really caught my eye. I’m so old that the first copy of this book I bought still had the author listed as Elana Nachman, rather than by the name she took in 1976, Elana Dykewomon.
Originally published by Daughters, Inc., a feminist press, in 1974, Riverfinger Women deals with a young woman’s coming to understand her sexual identity in—of course—the ’60s and ’70s.
It wasn’t all peace and love. Inez Riverfinger, Abby, Peggy, Rainbo Woman and Lucy Bear all come with their own stories and their own experiences with oppression show more and violence. What makes Riverfinger Women stand out, though, is the happy ending. The “lesbian novel” of the time almost always had women punished for daring to reject the trappings of the male-dominated world.
Riverfinger Women is also interesting for its use of notes, letters, posters, and other ephemera as a way to carry the narrative forward. Don’t mistake the value here as completely historical: Riverfinger Women is a rousing good story, flush with poetic language.
(Published on Lit/Rant on 2/28/2014: http://litrant.tumblr.com/post/78100703985/flashback-friday-young-wild-and-lesbi... show less
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Publishing Triangle 100 Best Lesbian and Gay Novels
97 works; 6 members
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33+ Works 798 Members
Elana Dykewomon was an editor of Sinister Wisdom from 1987 to 1995.
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