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Title: Substitute for Love by Karin Kallmaker ISBN: 1562802658 Publisher: Naiad Pr Pub. Date: October, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.52

Rating: 5
Summary: There is no substitute for Kallmaker
Comment: Just when you think she can't get better, Kallmaker manages to surprise you again. This book has it all: the insipid new age boyfriend and the politically driven right-wing Dad, both characters you'll love to hate, two women that you could swear you actually know, those much anticipated senuous sex scenes (No, don't skip to the chapter. It's better if you wait.)and a cadre of circumstances that will leave you angry, breathless, intoxicated and a believer in the power of love.

First and foremost this is a coming out story. It begins with both main characters, Holly and Reyna, denying the depth of their true natures. Holly believes she's in love with her teacher/boyfriend even though her relationship with him has been waning and unfulfilling for years because he's just so politically correct. Reyna, an avowed lesbian, hides her identity from the world so that her right-wing Christian coalition father will continue to provide medical support for her terminally ill mother. Kallmaker captures just how cruel people can be in the name of religious or righteous morality. Considering that we live in an age of terrorism, Kallmaker does a good job of dissecting the mind of those who would have us all believe as they believe. She does so without making either the father or boyfriend into monsters. It reminds me of a J.M. Redmann quote that evil is often banal.

We know that these two women are on a collision course because the first chapter tells us, but it does not get in the way of Kallmaker developing both of these characters separately. Holly needs to discover who she is, while Reyna needs to recognize that she can't exist in the vacuum of her father's world. They both need to come out of the place they're in. As an aside, Kallmaker also gets to show off a little bit of her mathmatical knowledge.

Although this may not be one of Kallmaker's most sexual books, don't worry, there is Chapter 11, all 15 pages of it. Believe me, it's worth the wait.

As always, there is no substitute for Kallmaker. She's the real deal when it comes to romance. Buy the book. This one's a keeper.

Rating: 5
Summary: Deserving Lammy Finalist - wow!
Comment: I didn't read this book until it showed up as a Lammy finalist. I've never been much of a romance fan because it's all a formula with girl-next-door characters. The sex fades to black before anything really interesting happens.

Karin Kallmaker seems to have no idea what a romance is supposed to be! She dares to defy the romance formula by delaying the actual meeting of the characters until nearly three-quarters of the way through the book. Then she has the audacity to spend an entire chapter on every sensation, nuance and climax that results when the two women finally do meet.

Not satisfied with that, she also spends way, way too much time developing her primary and secondary characters, giving them whole lives with real jobs and inescapable pressures. Reyna is hardly girl-next-door material, not with the bike, the secret life and a job doing research on behalf of anti-gay groups. Holly -- well, I can't even think of any other female mathematician in any lesbian-written literature. Again, not the girl-next-door at all.

Someone tell this woman she's writing terrible "romances!"

I notice in another review a suggestion that this book has nothing but bad male characters. Sure the boyfriend and father are only slightly redeemed by the end of the story, but there is a teacher and private detective who are both genuinely decent. The portrait of the "cured" gay man was heartbreaking.

I may be hooked on these terrible "romances" from now on. How shall I ever tell my friends?!

Rating: 5
Summary: Highly Recommended!
Comment: At long last, I finally read Kallmaker's critically acclaimed book, SUBSTITUTE FOR LOVE, and believe me, it was time well spent. This book is noteworthy and remarkable, and it very much deserved the Lammy nomination it got.

SFL is a well-plotted, intelligent, and nuanced book made all the more excellent by the way Kallmaker has woven thematic threads throughout. In addition, the story is well-written and capably edited, with memorable scenes and language. I found myself marking great passages (no, not the sex scenes! ) which I re-read when I finished the book.

Holly thinks she is a regular, run-of-the-mill straight woman. She has abandoned a promising math career because her long-term boyfriend, Clay, told her to, just as her overbearing aunt/foster mother has. Holly is, in actuality, an honest-to-goodness math wizard. Not only is she good at the subject, but she loves it. Instead of following her dream to be a math teacher and researcher, she works in an actuarial office so that *Clay* can be a teacher. She and Clay live rather predictably, with Clay's needs always coming first. "They had worked hard to keep everything the same from day to day, as if tomorrow would never come and niether of them would ever change."

After ten years, Holly is finally ready to crack out of her shell. For this, she is not prepared, but as Kallmaker tells us, "When dams burst, floods are inevitable." Holly's shocking realization that she is attracted to women begins a series of events that lead her to the other main character in the book, Reyna.

Unlike Holly, Reyna knows she is lost, but she is powerless to change her circumstances without harming her mother over whom her father has a chokehold. Reyna chooses to live a double life--one life that satisfies her domineering and over-reaching father, and the other life a series of one night stands carried out Friday nights after slipping away from the private detectives her father has watching her. Reyna works at her father's conservative think tank doing a job that is morally and ethically repugnant to her, but it pays her mom's medical bills and keeps her alive. She is trapped and spiraling further downward daily.

And then, Holly and Reyna meet, and sparks fly.

In addition to math/numbers analogies and themes, I loved the leitmotif of the sextant. Lost on a hike with friends, Holly is able to use a sextant and her math and mechanical skills to determine longitude and latitude in a key scene. But what she can do externally takes her much longer internally, and we are far into the book before "she accepted that even with two mirrors, the horizon, and a familiar star to navigate by, she still wouldn't know where she was." Neither Holly or Reyna know where they are, at least not until a lot of issues start getting worked out.

I liked the fact that this book was not a typical romance, nor was I able to guesstimate how it would turn out. I wanted it to have a happy ending, but right up to the end, I wasn't sure how that ending would look. It is to Kallmaker's credit that she has infused a genre book with such life, energy, and unpredictableness. Even the title has more than one meaning, with the word "substitute" working on multiple levels.

This is an example of lesbian fiction of the highest quality, well worth reading and rereading. I highly recommend it and find it to be, so far, my favorite book of 2002.

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