“Why do I want to kiss you?” Patrice whispered as Maxine stroked her long blond hair. Patrice arrived unexpectedly at Maxine’s Fifth Avenue penthouse, distraught after a bad date, and Maxine began to comfort her. Thus began their somewhat confusing relationship, which veered from Maxine setting up Patrice with new men, to strangely suggestive conversations between the two women.Ībout halfway through the book, things took a turn. When Patrice was jilted by her boyfriend in public, Maxine took pity on her and helped her get home. The book was about two women in New York City: a young and inexperienced blonde, Patrice and an older brunette, Maxine. She went back to the book, opening it carefully so that she didn’t crease the spine, and began to read. She glanced around the edge of the book rack, sharply conscious that she was still in public, but although she could hear the ringing of the cash register at the front of the store, she didn’t see anyone approaching her corner. The title was Strange Season, and the tagline read, “She couldn’t escape the unnatural desires of her heart.”Īn electric thrill went through Lily. The blonde wore a pink negligee and knelt on the ground, eyes cast down demurely while the shapely brunette lurked behind her. One of the books had two women on the cover, a blonde and a brunette. It was the women’s pliant bodies, their bare legs and lush breasts, mouths like shiny red candies.
There was something disturbing about the illustrations-and it wasn’t the leering men. The men loomed behind them or clutched them in muscular arms, bending the women’s bodies backward so that their breasts pointed up. The women on these book covers seemed to have a lot of trouble keeping their clothes on. The book rack alcove was normally deserted, but even so, Lily spun the rack self-consciously, retreating behind it so that she was hidden from view. Lily normally bypassed that rack but today she paused, drawn in by The Castle of Blood, on which the blonde’s red gown seemed about to slip off her substantial bosom, nipples straining against the thin fabric.
One was full of thrillers with lurid covers depicting scantily clad women in the embrace of swarthy men. There were several rotating racks of them in a sheltered alcove beyond the sanitary napkin aisle. She had soon discovered that Thrifty had another advantage over the Chinatown pharmacy: it had a very good selection of paperback novels. Thrifty was just outside the neighborhood, so her friends didn’t usually go there.
She had ducked in to buy a box of Kotex, because she hadn’t wanted to get them at the pharmacy in Chinatown, where she’d risk running into people she knew. The first time Lily had gone to Thrifty had been sometime last year.
*This audiobook includes a PDF of the bibliography and acknowledgments from the book. With deportation looming over her father-despite his hard-won citizenship-Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.Īmerica in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other." And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: "Have you ever heard of such a thing?" Acclaimed author of Ash Malinda Lo returns with her most personal and ambitious novel yet, a gripping story of love and duty set in San Francisco's Chinatown during the 1950s.