June Akers Seese s second novel is about

books and the people who read them: it s

about a rare-book dealer and his mistress,

set in that era when words like mistress

were still used, and recalling the years

when Lenny Bruce, Edith Piaf, and Freud

might share the same paragraph in an after-

bonrs night spot. Seese writes movingly,

tightly, without recourse to adjeetives,

from the gut and to the gut.

The scenes shift from libraries to bed-

rooms and everything is qnestioned:

discount houses, abortion, singles bars,

black power, and old age. The places shift

from Detroit to New York to San Francisco,

from the mid- 1950s to the beginning of the

counterculture 60s. While in San Fran-

cisco, Kate McGhee--the mistress and

narrator--listens to an unknown singer

named Janis Joplin.

With close attention to detail, Seese

recaptures that time whcn the first stirrings

of feminism would call into qnestion many

of the assumptions and values women like

Kate were raised ender and, often enongh,

buried under. More than anything, Seese s

characters crave reality and the strength to

endure it.