Synopsis
In a contemporary world much unlike our own, two women named Laurie and Jaqe find themselves and each other, only to be separated by Mother Night - a small, elderly woman in extravagant clothes who is, literally, death. She and her five red-haired, leather-clad bikers cruise through the lives of the lovers and their daughter, leaving behind a tale of heartbreak and humor, of loss and joy, of death and life.
Reviews
Departing from the future society she traced in Unquenchable Fire and Temporary Agency (a Nebula Award finalist), Pollack imagines with flair a fantasy world sprawled across the back of a giant turtle. At a dance at a college in a city "in the eastern part of the turtle, not far from the sea," two young women, Laurie and Jaqe, meet and fall in love. They also meet Mother Night, who helps the couple cope with the obstacles strewn across their path by family and society. An older, redheaded woman who rides around on a motorcycle, surrounded by a crew of younger, similarly carrot-topped women, Mother Night is in fact Death. While she helps Laurie and Jaqe in their quest for peace and justice, she also brings about the early demise of one of the lovers, shortly after a baby daughter is born. Mother Night becomes a true godmother to this child, watching over her and disclosing to her secrets of the departed. Pollack's fairy-tale plot is resourceful and original, but here, as in her earlier fiction, the emphasis is on character as she portrays women's intimate relationships with one another with resonance and realism. This is another fine outing by one of the most gifted and sensitive fantasists working today.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
While this begins as a depiction of modern lesbian life, it grows inexorably into a magical exploration of the deepest roots of life and death. Pollack (Temporary Agency, 1994, etc.) tells a story that shifts with remarkable ease between the world of mundanity and the world of fairy tale and folklore. Essentially, it falls into three, large movements (which do not quite match the novel's internal divisions). In the first, we meet Laurie and Jaqe, two college women who fall in love and (after Laurie drops out of graduate school) set up housekeeping. They have several disturbing encounters with a mysterious woman called Mother Night and her entourage of Motorcycle Girls. Jaqe eventually decides that she wants to become a mother; a friend finds an anonymous sperm donor, and in due course Jaqe gives birth to a daughter, Kate. Shortly thereafter, Jaqe dies--and we learn that Mother Night is Death incarnate. In the second section, we see Kate growing up (Laurie has adopted her), with Mother Night in the role of godmother. Kate is a bit of a misfit in school, but she moves easily in the ghostly world revealed to her by her godmother. Mother Night offers Kate, who is deeply affected by the suffering of others, a healing potion with which she can save some of those whom conventional medicine cannot help--but only those whom Mother Night tells her are not already doomed. In the third section, we see Kate grown up and working as a healer. When she begins to question Mother Night's decisions, she has to face a difficult choice--with the fate of her own lover in the balance. Throughout the narrative, Pollack finds graceful transitions between realistic portrayals of modern urban life and a fantastic landscape peopled with angry ghosts, lesbian biker Valkyries, and incarnations of supernatural powers. Tender and disturbing, down-to-earth and wildly inventive, this complex novel shows Pollack to be one of our best fantasists. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Pollack gives us another solidly crafted, well-researched tale of goddess-centered lesbian life, of magick and magical potions. Set in an unspecified time "when two women . . . lived on the back of a turtle," this allegorical fantasy of love and loss tells the engrossing story of Laurie and Jacqueline, star-crossed lovers whose child becomes a healer with the aid of her godmother, Mother Night. Accompanied by a fetching retinue of red-haired, leather-jacketed MGs (i.e., Motorcycle Girls), Mother Night first brings Laurie and Jacqueline together, then strikes a deal with Laurie that, in the best tradition of the Grimms' tales, brings about a loved one's death and a child's secret tutoring in things glimpsed but rarely seen by mere mortals. To say more would ruin the book for potential readers. Suffice it to say that Pollack (who is an expert on the Tarot, too) has balanced light and dark, delightful fantasy and everyday reality, to make Godmother Night charmingly serious. Whitney Scott
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