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harukoreads's review
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
What a charming piece of history - I came upon this by chance at a thrift shop and picked it up purely because of the "Lesbian Mystery" subheading on the cover, and ended up pleasantly surprised by how engrossing this short volume is. It does suffer from some pretty bad pacing issues that I think a good editor could have helped with (we get about 15% of the way through the book before the letters are introduced, and 80% of the way through before the word "lesbian" appears on page; also most of the action is crammed into the final chapter which is four times the length of previous chapters...) but the ending is heartwarming. I also really enjoyed the focus on feminism, although I wish we had gotten more discussion of what it means to be a divorced woman in the 80s, and a woman discovering her sexuality later in life, for that matter. I won't be reading more of this series because the storytelling wasn't to my taste (the repeated motif of the orchid was a bit too dramatic for my taste, also see my pacing issues listed above), but I am very glad I read this one.
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