Felicia Sullivan

the smartest kind of chick lit., July 9 2004

Reviewed by Bonnie MacAllister of Small Spiral Notebook

Red Dress Ink has offered a surprisingly witty and literary work in Hubbard's take on the life of a struggling writer forced to move back home and to take on clients as a professional housecleaner. Protagonist Lisa Marie supplements her household toil by writing an anonymous advice column for the New Sparta Other. Both manual tasks reveal a paper trail which leads to discovering unsigned semi-pornographic letters, political corruption, gender-bending expeditions to Florida, and cross-dressing novelists who enact English royalty.

The novel is sprinkled with literary references to the classics and books of etiquette: she samples… Read more

shocking, tantalizing and conquering ...., July 2 2004

Reviewed by: John A. Mangarella for Small Spiral Notebook

When author Michelle Baldwin found her way into Denver's Mercury Café to see her first burlesque show, a career was not only born but the first lines of this delightful study of burlesque took shape. The is not just a book, it's the best type of book, a time machine back to the last century when English actress Lydia Thompson toured the U.S.A., shocking, tantalizing and conquering the American stage.

Baldwin's meticulous research, her obvious affection for burlesque, both legendary and contemporary, compels every page of this book to dance before the reader's eyes with a history of women who were not only ahead of their… Read more

observations of the relationship between sex, death & love, Jun 28 2004

A mother dying of breast cancer who wants to love, a daughter with a revolving door into her bedroom but a Beware sign on her heart, a desperate, acerbic friend whose lips puff like down pillows and beds a man because she likes that he likes her, a woman who obsesses over her husband's infidelity, and a teenage girl with moxie who lends out her body like a library book while her father pines over the mother that left them behind: Elizabeth, Rachel, Angela, Emma, and Georgia are the central figures in Lisa Glatt's auspicious novel-in-stories, A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That.

The novel shifts between the women's points of view from 1997-2000, all bearing the weight of someone leaving. At… Read more