Harem Wish

Two exotic, erotic, and witty stories about love between women weave together toward a dramatic and liberating conclusion as Sari, a harem girl in ancient Arabia, and Codie, of modern New York, find their destinies. A first novel. 10,000 first printing. Tour.

Carr follows more than 20 children's and YA books with an erotic, poignant and slyly satirical adult debut with two distinct settings: contemporary New York City and a fairy-tale harem somewhere in far off-Felix Arabia, long ago in the distant and possibly fictional past. Codie James is a children's book editor and aspiring ballet dancer whose relationship with her lesbian lover Dee is beginning to deteriorate. The disordered account of Codie and Dee's love affair, from its passionate beginning to its angry end, parallels Codie's fantasy romance between her other self, the concubine Sari, and Anwa, the Mukarrib's favorite. Meanwhile, the atmosphere at Codie's publishing company goes from bad to a very hilarious worse: in one wickedly accurate scene, the company's marketing whiz reveals the automatic success of any book with "wish" in the title. "So what we obviously need to do to really capitalize on the supremo power of the word is to create a new series, one that could generate a book a month, maybe more." Codie must come to grips with her job, relationships (real and fantastic) and the truth of an unhappy childhood, but the superabundance of material never overwhelms the story. Quick cuts from one scene to the next keep the pages moving briskly and inevitably towards a moving, hopeful conclusion. Carr is capable of great tenderness, and her playful, pun-filled voice is a delight. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A modern lesbian affair inspires fantasies of a past-life romance in this gawky, enthusiastic adult fiction debut by a children's book author. Although Codie James has abandoned her suburban Ohio hometown for New York, memories of an equivocal, possibly sexual, experience with her father and her mother's subsequent nervous breakdown continue to haunt her. Laboring in the editorial offices of a children's publishing house, twentysomething Codie suffers a tiresome series of failed heterosexual affairs before falling for breathtakingly assertive Dee T. Matthews, a black, female cab driver and occasional writer. Delighted with her new lover, Codie settles down for what she hopes will be a lifetime of cozy evenings spent critiquing each other's story ideas and watching The Newlywed Game. But Codie has to admit that Dee is ``a global kind of girl,'' and the cabbie's eye soon begins to wander. Fear of losing Dee and increased pressure at the office send Codie spinning emotionally; she begins dreaming of a former life in ancient Arabia, where she believes she first met Dee in a harem and fell in love. Codie's obsession with this imagined past increases as her present life disintegrates. Dee moves out, and Codie's fantasies of illicit sex and ancient intrigue take over after she loses her job. The tragic story of her two invented concubines must play itself out before Codie can wake up to the beauty of the present day and lay to rest her longing for Dee. The author's sloppy evocation of both ancient and modern settings vies throughout with her contagious enthusiasm for romantic love, resulting in a dead draw of a novel: amateurish but endearingly cheerful. ``In my experience,'' Codie says, ``when your heart is full to overflowing, the corniest things spill out of your mouth.'' In this case, all too true. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Carr braids a bloody fairy tale, a lesbian romance, and a psychological trip back into childhood trauma into a snare for the reader. The fairy tale, involving Sari the virgin dancer and her ill-fated lover, Anwa, favorite of the moment in the harem of the mukarrib in some fabulous Middle Eastern country, is the creation of children's book editor Kodiak--Codie for short--whose lover, a cab driver named Dee, is slipping away from her. Carr has this development lead backward into Codie's childhood in search of the reason for her need to escape from reality into Sari's world. The familiarly exotic Arabian Nights-like imagery mesmerizes with its repetition and its opulent counterpoint to Codie's mounting confusion and disillusionment in the contemporary, "real" world. Carr's intriguing first novel also affords behind-the-scenes glimpses of the children's book trade, not to mention its wedding Carr's credits as writer for Playgirl and Variety and as author of some 20 children's and YA books. Marie Kuda