The Book Sense 76
-- The Children's 76
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Paula Martinac's Out of Time is a Lambda Literary Award winner. When protagonist Susan Van Dine ducks into an antiques shop in New York City and discovers a scrapbook of photos from the 1920s, her life becomes inextricably linked with the four women in the photographs. Part mystery, part love story, this is a delightful and thoughtful novel about history, love and the persistence of passion.

Judith Katz's The Escape Artist is the fascinating story of Sofia Teitelbaum, who is tricked into prostitution and away from her gentle Eastern European family. Drugged and taken off to the brothels and gangster dens of Jewish Buenos Aires at the beginning of the 20th century, Sofia meets and falls in love with Hankus -- formerly Hannah -- Lubarsky, who has fled to Buenos Aires to escape the pogroms of Poland. Together they scheme to free Sofia and spin their way into an imagined lesbian future.

A 1998 Lambda Literary Award winner, Elana Dykewomon's Beyond The Pale is an epic novel that bears testimony to the lives of Russian Jewish lesbians who immigrated to North America at the turn of the 20th century. Chava, Rose, Gurke, and Dovida embark on a courageous journey that takes them into the radical cauldron of New York City, far beyond the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia, and outside the bounds of convention.
Tipping The Velvet, by Sarah Waters, is another fine epic -- this one taking place in England at the turn of the 20th century. It chronicles the adventures of Nan King, oyster-girl from the seaside town of Whitstable, whose fortunes are forever changed when she falls in love with a cross-dressing music hall singer named Miss Kitty Butler. The two fall in love, Nan follows Kitty, Kitty breaks her heart, and Nan moves on to her own thrilling and varied sexual education, finally finding friendship and true love in the most unexpected places.

Mary Sharratt's Summit Avenue is a beautifully crafted debut novel set in the Twin Cities during the years 1911-1918. Kathrin, a young German immigrant, finds kindness in other German immigrants, who find her a job translating fairytales for an enigmatic older woman. And, of course, love follows…but not without its problems. A wonderful coming-of-age story intertwined with the power of fairytales as they influence our sense of self.

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