Roberts, retired from working as a portrait artist and acting in California's La Jolla Playhouse, completed this debut novel at 80. Is it the consummation of decades of observation, onstage performance, and note taking--the dreamed-of first novel masterwork--no. However, it's well worth reading, especially for the historic backdrop, since readers meet the adolescent protagonists in 1935 and follow them until 1941. The author's use of parallel heroines Mina and Chana can be confusing initially, but readers will soon adapt, knowing the two are destined for each other after encountering unsuitable partners and society's hatred of same-sex love. They're equally destined for Greenwich Village, New York's bohemian bastion of artists, writers, eccentrics, and homosexuals. Along the way, however, they experience incest, brutality, forced marriage, total family domination, and eventual rejection--and even a decent man. We are who we are, suggests Roberts, so the pleasure in this book is in the journey of two young women struggling to make a life together, not find themselves, in a rapidly changing world. Whitney Scott

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