The Silk Road Book

Three great things about naming your fictional hometown Hell: you can suggest so much about growing up in suburbia in the '60s; you can shamelessly use Dante for your epigram; and you can deliver wry, double-edged observations along the lines of "Children in Hell ... provide constant birdsong." Jane Summer's stylish debut has more going for it than this joke, but the puckish, observant sensibility behind the choice of the town name permeates this coming-of-age novel and accounts for its unusual appeal. The story itself--a determined girl's slow seduction of an older woman--may seem all too familiar to lesbian readers who endured the '70s or early '80s. In The Silk Road, high school sophomore Paige Bergman, blessed with good looks but cursed with eyeglasses, accepts a baby-sitting job with a strange family across town, the Gallaghers, only to discover that Mrs. Gallagher is the same woman Paige has been quietly obsessed with for the past year: the elegant driver of a Buick Skylark that is sometimes parked near Paige's house. Without the soft-focus nostalgia common to the genre, Summer's depiction of early love is skillfully written and achingly accurate. --Regina Marler Read More