If the Wind Were a Woman by Kelly Sinclair

Publisher:          Blue Feather Books, Ltd.

Kelly Sinclair sets her new novel in Tantona, Texas in the 1970s.  Tantona is a typical small southern town.  Men are in charge, women stay home to take care of the family, and most people go to church on Sunday.  It hardly seems to be a place that is on the cusp of the changes that are gripping the country, but appearances can be deceiving.  Latino/Hispanic/Mexican Americans (they can't decide what to call them) are moving in to change the culture, some of the women are going to work and a scandal breaks over them revealing that there is at least one lesbian in the town.  Oh, if they only knew.

Barbara Wolfe isn't interested in being an advocate for anyone.  The fact that she is a lesbian is the worst kept secret in Tantona, but as long as she's not overt about it, people are willing to pretend they don't know.  Barbara is discreet about her affairs until she meets Darlene Fisher.  One little slip nearly gets Barbara killed, she loses her job and most of the town sees her as a pariah, including her own daughter.  Barbara can handle her own problems, but she's afraid of what might happen to Darlene.  While they try not to antagonize the town, the women find themselves in the midst of a group of family and friends who are determined to help them make their relationship work.  Maybe, just maybe, it's time to test the people of Tantona and find out how many, if any, of them are willing to catch up to what is beginning to happen in the rest of the country.

If the Wind Were a Woman provides a picture that is beginning to disappear in lesbian literature as young women who are growing up in a different time don't know about or remember a time not too long ago when things were very different in the US.  Sinclair reminds the reader that not only was being gay a crime, but it could very easily get you killed and many law enforcement officials simply did not care.  Identifying other members of the gay community to form a support system could be difficult to impossible and being in the closet was a survival tactic, not simply a choice.  Sinclair captures that predicament very well with Barbara and another character named George.  One is forced into the open and the other is terrified that he will be put in the same position.  They also demonstrate how what happens to one person can have a ripple effect on other people and their decisions.

One of the strongest themes in this book is about the power of women even when people do not perceive that they have that power.  The blurb on the back of the book says that Darlene is "an uncontrollable force of nature" who is driving the action in the book.  That is questionable.  There are a number of women who drive different issues and Darlene seems to have the least strength of all of them.  She spends most of the book pretending to be interested in men while Barbara stands in front of the community and takes the blows.  There is also Barbara's best friend Mary who is defiant in the face of the townspeople and will not desert her friend just because she is a lesbian.  Gracie Munoz shows her strength in forcing the town to accept cultural diversity and Barbara's mother exhibits another type of courage when she refuses to let the town shame her daughter.  The book is an homage to the role that women play, when they are at their best, in holding families together, managing the civic conscience and fighting for the underdog.

If the Wind Were a Woman is not a long book, only 172 pages, but it packs a lot of story in it.  An author does not need to write a lot of words if she knows which words to choose.  The book shows how far society has come and, unfortunately, has not come.  It's worth reading.

Lesser Prophets by Kelly Sinclair

Publisher:                        Blue Feather Books

Kelly Sinclair takes a story off of the front page of the newspaper to tell a tale in Lesser Prophets that is somewhat apocalyptic and based on a frightening possibility, with a twist.

Secret experiments in China cause a variety of swine flu to mutate and then it escapes into the human population.  People eventually die by the billions, heterosexual people.  A component of this virus causes it to infect people who are genetically homosexual, but it doesn't kill them.  They become carriers and lethal to those people who don't carry the correct genetic material.  Variant Swine Flu, VSF, doesn't play favorites.  As leaders of countries and CEOs of corporations are wiped out, so are the poor in the slums, middle class office workers and those who can afford to barricade themselves in their homes, only to die there.  Societies spin out of control and gay people suddenly find themselves both the hope for anyone's survival and hated for their ability to transmit the illness.  The book illustrates what steps civilization would take to survive and the ironic circumstance that the people who were once among the most hated and persecuted are now the leaders everyone looks to for answers.

Sinclair uses the first person accounts of five women to tell the events. As she rotates them through each chapter, it creates the feeling of reading random pages from a collection of diaries and gives the story a very personal feeling.  A number of issues are raised for the reader to consider.  The tests on gay people who die show that they did not carry the gay gene, yet they identified that way, opening the issue of the impact of "nature versus nurture." When the decision is made to try to save heterosexuals by putting them in isolated domes and camps, the conflict over how many civil rights a person should give up for the public good recalls incidents like the Japanese-American internment camps.  People who have never been "out" are suddenly identified to everyone because they survive and people who never realized they were gay and had happy straight unions are confronted with the reality that their genetic code meant them to be something else.  The book doesn't preach about these issues.  They are simply presented along with others as problems that the new world has to deal with and the reader is left to think about the implications of all of them.  Sinclair doesn't provide neat answers for them either.

Lesser Prophets is a different type of book.  It qualifies as science fiction because of the topic, but the topic is also one that could very possibly occur if in a different form.  It isn't a romance, although there are love stories in it.  Those who expect every book to have a sex scene won't find that here.  It is one that will make the reader think and, when the book is finished, have to think about whether or not the book was liked.   

Reading Lesser Prophets is a different experience and trying something different occasionally is probably a good thing to do.

Accidental Rebels by Kelly Sinclair

Publisher:        Blue Feather Books


Tantona, Texas, is a typical Southern town in 1989. Being gay is highly undesirable, proven by the fact that a local church offers a group to “cure” people of that condition. It’s conservative, Christian and, unknown to most of the town, including the gay people, rampant with homosexuals. A few are out, most are closeted and some haven’t discovered their true natures yet. 

Mandy Gabriel is trying very hard to deny her natural tendencies, but she’s losing the battle. Tina Ransom, the town librarian, is scared that someone will discover her true nature and it will cost her the job she loves, but she’s more afraid of the genetic disaster that may be hanging over her. Tina’s fear is nothing compared to the terror of her secret lover Sydney Melson, who is willing to marry a man to protect her teaching job. 

Cat and Neil Acuff live in a comfortable marriage, necessitated fifteen years earlier when they tried to prove they weren’t gay by having sex and instead created their son Wesley. Now they are best friends and Cat releases her passion by singing lead for a band in her spare time. 

This group and their friends are beginning to feel restless and ready for a change. As they begin to interact, more and more gay people pop up in the town and changes begin to ripple through the community. Maybe some of these people will find the happiness that has been eluding them.

Kelly Sinclair has created a story about people trying to find themselves and where they fit in their community, or if they can. She paints a picture of the prejudices that can exist in a small town community, not just towards homosexuality, but anything that appears to be “different” from the norm. Sinclair may have been too intent on showing how many forces can be at work because she includes a lot of characters. The book is reminiscent of the movie “The Big Chill” in that it introduces a lot of plot lines that are loosely connected by a central theme, but some of them aren’t fully developed. This gives a superficial approach to some of the stories, though the one that eventually includes Cat and Tina makes a good focus for the book. Sinclair can be applauded for trying something different and enough of the stories are left open that a follow-up book might be possible.