Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary

Career-Girl #1

by Monica Nolan

The story your mother never told you-printed here for your own good. Lois Lenz was like any other wholesome former cheerleader with a knack for office skills-until she took a job at Sather & Sterling in bustling Bay City. Spending her days in the cut-throat typing pool and her nights at the all-women's residence of Magdalena Arms, Lois had no idea she was entering a world of working girls whose passionate desires-and fabulous fashion sense-could lead any innocent lamb astray . . . Netta-serious and smart, she's unlike any woman Lois has known . . . Maxie-The height of society fashion, and girls are so very in style . . . Pamela-Lois's old high school Pep Squad pal certainly has changed . . . Miss Gill-the office manager has secrets and plenty of file cabinets to keep them in . . . Dolly-an actress whose martini shaker is as busy as her love life . . . Mrs. Pierson- "The hyena" Lois's boss, her office is a place of hard work and private dictation . . . And many more! Lois Lenz-she was a good girl a long way from home about to discover that not everything is what it seems, navy is a bad suit choice, and love can bloom in the strangest of places . . .

Genres: Fiction, Queer, Lesbian, LGBT, Mystery, Romance, Adult

246 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2007

About the author

Monica Nolan is the author of Lois Lenz Lesbian Secretary, Bobby Blanchard Lesbian Gym Teacher, Maxie Mainwaring Lesbian Dilettante, and Dolly Dingle Lesbian Landlady which will hit the shelves October, 2014. She and co-author Alisa Surkis were nominated for a Lambda Literary award for The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories, which won the Diagram Prize for oddest title. She blogs about lesbian pulp fiction at Pulp and Pep. She has experience in three out of four of the careers she's written about.

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was such a fun read, I missed my stop on the subway coming home, then stayed up past my bedtime to finish it. While matching the tone and style of older pulp novels, this 2007 book can afford racier puns (page 3: high school Lois's best friend makes them late for their boy-dates by stalling in the locker room showers and Lois responds, "Well, you're the one who got me all wet again") and bolder politics (although certain characters may view interracial dating and communist sympathies as unacceptable, it is obvious that the author does not).

Beebo Brinker is my main point of comparison, and while this book is a little sillier than that classic, it is also a little more fun. Beebo spends most of the book horribly ashamed her unnatural desires, but Lois mostly finds them a curious (though delightful) obstacle to her focus as a budding secretary. When she finally does realize that she's a big lesbo, she barely misses a beat to feel weird about it, and quickly moves onto the fun part without the guilt. And unlike the Beebo series, littered with domestic violence and unhealthy relationships, Monica Nolan infuses her book with sex-positive references to consensual kink. She also throws in the words "gay" and "queer" (as in "happy" and "odd") when she doesn't have to, like little winks at her new-millenium readership.

What Nolan does keep the same is the basic tease. Sex is not graphic or frequent (lots of delayed opportunites and pent up desires), but we always know about the female characters' hair, lips, body shape, and fashion choices, and their effect on poor Ms. Lenz's concentration. It's actually a lot like reading a pre-teen girl series: this is the fun one, and she looks like this and she wears this; this is the serious one, and she looks like this and wears this; this is the sweet one, and you get the idea. The characters are a campy, sexy, lesbian doll collection! Plus, when Lois isn't fantasizing about the copy editor's inner thigh, she is dreaming up more efficient filing systems, which is flat out hilarious.

A few choice passages below-- beware, spoilers!

A guy on the bus hits on Lois the day after she figures out her sexuality:

Why, he doesn't know I'm a Lesbian career girl!

Yes, Lesbian is capitalized.

Consummation with a crush at the very end of the book:

"How could I be sure you felt the way I did? You're so young, and from what I've heard, you've been running around all summer like a puppy, picking up a new scent every two seconds."
"I'm hardly a puppy-- I'm a permanent private secretary!"

And my favorite, during a makeout session with an office girl:

"Tell me about your favorite filing system," Paula whispered in her ear before trailing her warm mouth along Lois's neck. Lois felt more buttons being unbuttoned, and then Paula's mouth was on her now bare shoulder. She clutched at Paula, bracing herself against the tremors that shook her.
"Well, I've been experimenting with a method that combines the ahhhhlphabetical with the chronological-- ohhhh!"

Yeah, isn't that amazing?

[LVLMLeah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been so bored lately with the books I’ve started reading, tired of the usual erotica, or common lesbian story lines and have wanted to read something completely different. When I saw the title and cover of this book, I knew I had to read it. I was hoping it’d be campy, retro, and humorous and it didn’t disappoint at all. It was a blast reading this book. It’s light, slightly irreverent and honors lesbian pulp of the 50’s.

From the book cover: Her soul was pure, Her desires were sinful, Her typing was impeccable. Buwahaha! I’m sorry, but this totally grabbed me.

Have any of you seen the spoof movie The Brady Bunch Movie? The movie pulls the Brady family out of the 70’s and places them into the 90’s. The family still act as if they are living in the 70’s and their cluelessness and naiveté about how things are in the 90’s makes for funny moments. This is how Lois Lenz comes across in this book. Like she’s from the 50’s but was dropped into later times, although the story and other characters are in the 50’s. Written in 2007, this story is both a spoofy take on 50’s pulp fiction, as well as the popular beliefs at that time.

It’s 1957 and Lois and her best friend Faye, the most popular girl in school, are graduating from high school. From a small town called Walnut Grove, they are fairly naïve about the ways of the world. Both girls have been practicing kissing with each other so they can be better experienced with the boys. But Lois rather enjoys these little sessions, even though she doesn’t understand why, and wishes she could practice more often with Faye. In fact, she’s a bit frustrated and would like to practice some 2nd and 3rd base techniques as well.

Lois and Faye are inherently different though. Faye is all about becoming the perfect---kept in a style which she’s being brought up in--- woman, while Lois has ambitions to realize her talent for filing and organization. Lois’ guidance counselor suggests that she go to the big city and work since she’s so talented at typing and such. Going against Faye’s magnetic hold on her, Lois decides to go to Bay City and work for the summer and convinces her mother that she will not be taken by white slave traders, nor will she be seduced by those commies and marijuana users since she will be staying at a “very safe” boarding house for women.

Since a job at the most famous advertising agency has been lined up for her already, she moves into the 5th floor of the Magdalena Arms boarding house. The women are all nice and friendly, but right away, Lois notices something very “queer” (snort) about the women and there’s definitely something they're all hiding. But what could it be, she wonders? heh

Lois starts working for the queen byotch (The Hyena), the most influential female advertising executive and she is berated every day by her. But she stays “gay” and all in her attitude and tries to fit in.

Slowly she realizes that no one is who they seem and finds herself embroiled in all kinds of sexual (although she stays pretty clueless about her attractions to women) antics, work intrigues and boarding house secrets. Things come to a head and she tries to fit all the mysterious pieces together.

Normally, I get pissed off at Mary Sue characters. Let’s face it, Lois is a goody-two-shoes who always does the right thing and points out when others are doing less than legal or good things. But in this case, she’s so delightfully clueless that it’s entertaining.

I mean she takes things so literally; like when the girls ask her if she likes girls and she replies that, of course, her best friend is a girl--- then wonders why would anyone ask such a thing. And she has no idea that she might be one of those “career girl lesbians!” She sees all the signs: she's sexually seduced by her boss, which had an interesting twist, and a co-worker, she walks in on a girl that used to be a crush of hers on the cheerleader squad with one of the girls at her boarding house half naked and rubbing up against each other, and yet, she still doesn’t get it. It’s almost hilarious how out of touch she is. In fact, everyone around her can’t believe that she’s so clueless and there are a few Being There moments in which some think she’s uber brilliant in acting so dumb!

Ms Nolan kept Lois walking a line that didn’t make her pathetic or a someone who'd be the brunt of ridicule. The juxtaposition of everyone else being savvy to what’s going on, while Lois is clueless made this story more interesting. I rather liked Lois. Once she figures things out (it takes a long while), she’s very accepting and goes with the flow. Even to the point of again, being out of touch with how society will perceive her. But that made her charming and endearing.

Other than that, there are a gaggle of other characters, all lesbian and all colorfully different and clearly characterized. Outside of the obvious lesbian angle, it was fun that the author included all those typically feared things and ideals of the 50’s: the threat of commies, getting hooked on drugs and losing control (heh, Lois tells about watching a movie about it in high school. Reefer Madness anyone?), women having careers vs. aspiring to being the perfect wife and mother, and so on.

The writing is easy flowing with lots of double entendres to today’s usage of words (queer, gay) and period slang. There really isn’t much of a love story, although the author tried to tie things up in that area. That part didn’t work for me since I couldn’t see Lois feeling like she did with that particular girl. Not enough sexual or romantic tension there. And Lois does muse that she’s becoming one of those sex crazed women she’s read about in the popular rag mag since she has a sexual attraction to almost everyone at some point.

All in all, I highly recommend this book just for the fun of it. The retro vibe and characterizations are realistic, a bit funny, and it’s written quite well.

[Melanie Page · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book on a recommendation from Chance Lee, one of my Goodreads buddies whose reviews are funny and insightful. I couldn’t get over the title and so further looked into Monica Nolan’s work. After Lois Lenz comes Bobby Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacher; Maxie Mainwaring, Lesbian Dilettante; and Dolly Dingle, Lesbian Landlandy. There’s also the superbly titled The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories. According to her Goodreads profile, she “has experience in three out of the four careers she’s written about.” Please, please, let Monica Nolan be an ex-gym teacher! I bought all four of the lesbian lady novels.

Monica Nolan’s whole “Lesbian Career Girl” series borrows from the old pulp novels, from the writing style (lots of shocked characters yelling with exclamation points) to the cover. According to the New Yorker Robert de Graff started Pocket Books in 1939 and switched to cheap paper — pulp — to make them affordable and mass-marketable (the first press to do so in America). Finally, feeling that it wasn’t enough to have Americans ordering their books from catalogs because there were so few bookstores (only about 2,800), he decided to cash in on the “more than seven thousand newsstands, eighteen thousand cigar stores, fifty-eight thousand drugstores, and sixty-two thousand lunch counters — not to mention train and bus stations.” According to the author of the article, “People who didn’t have a local bookstore, and even people who would never have ventured into a bookstore, could now browse the racks while filling a prescription or waiting for a train and buy a book on impulse.” (Fun Fact: de Graff felt books should never cost more than a pack of cigarettes).

Suddenly, books with titles like Hitch-Hike Hussy and The Daughter of Fu Manchu were available, along with “whodunit?” novels, hard-boiled detective fiction, and romances. Pulp novels are especially famous for their covers. Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary follows in the tradition of having an eye-catch pulp cover (though I must add the quality of paper is very good).

The novel, I’m pretty sure, is set in the 1950s, when women are starting to do things out of the house, but it’s looked down on as selfish. Lois and her best friend, Faye, are about to graduate high school in Walnut Grove, home of the Nutshells. The plan is for them to go to a junior college together, marry their high school sweethearts, live next door to each other, and have babies!

But something happens when the guidance counselor, a strong women (possibly a lesbian), tells Lois her grades in filing and typing are fantastic and that she should consider going to live in the “big city” to get a job as a secretary. It’s interesting to watch an 18-year-old girl get so excited about being a secretary. Faye is mad and Lois’s mom scoffs, but the guidance counselor says she has a job and a supervised boarding house — the Magdalena Arms — lined up for Lois. Lois is going to miss all the practice kissing she does with Faye, but her boyfriend is no big deal (it turns out he’s using Lois as a cover to date an African American girl…I mean, it’s like having a “beard,” but for race). Lois bucks tradition and goes…to the hot, stinky city to find the Magdalena Arms is pretty dumpy. Her room on the 5th floor is shabby, too.

At lot happens the first night in the Magdalena Arms when the friendly girls of the 5th floor have some drinks in one of the rooms. This book is full of puns. When Lois is asked if she likes girls, the author uses the verb “queried” Get it? Queer-ied? The Magdalena Arms is described as “quite a special atmosphere — so gay, so liberal, yet closely supervised and cared for all the same.” After Lois discovers an older girl, Pamela, who was on her cheerleading squad in Walnut Grove, visiting the Magdalena Arms, the whole 5th floor does a toast to old friends:

“To the Nutshells,” everyone echoed, and drank.

“Pamela had the highest kick in the state!” Lois told them proudly.

“I’m not surprised,” drawled Maxie. “Pamela’s always been very limber.”

Predictably, Lois very quickly gets drunk, for she is not used to alcohol, and Netta puts her to bed. Lois slurs, “You’re not a white slaver, are you?” and Netta — sweet Netta with her hair in a bun and glasses — replies, “No, I’m a school teacher.”

The next morning, Lois goes to her first day on the job. It turns out she will not be working in the typing pool as she thought she would; she’s going to be the personal secretary to the boss, Mrs. Pierson — whose nicknamed the hyena. When she gets home, Lois tells a 5th floor girl, Dolly, about it: “A promotion practically before you started…You’re going straight to the top, kid, straight to the top — even if you have to ride the hyena to get there!” These kinds of sexual puns are everywhere, and they make the story that saucy kind of light-hearted fun you want every so often.

Most of Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary is clear to the reader — namely that Lois is a lesbian, and so is almost every other female in the book. Lois doesn’t recognize what’s going on, so she’s often confused. There are also twists and misleading clues, such as why no one can go in the filing room at work, what happened to a girl who used to live on the 5th floor, where a sexy photo came from, why there was a break in at the Magdalena Arms, and who is a communist.

Yes, Lois is paranoid about communists. Her mother read in the newspaper about communists and “white slavers” in the big city and warned Lois not to take the secretary job. But when the girls of the 5th floor all go out to dinner, they make fun of Lois’s mother for her paranoia. But then things get more serious:

“But honestly, that attitude has ruined thousands of innocent lives,” said Phyllis earnestly, pushing her classes back up on her nose.

“Yes, it is sad,” agreed Netta, twirling her spaghetti expertly around her fork. “One of my professors at Teacher’s College in Minnesota was forced to resign, just because he’d signed some petition about the Scottsboro Boys!”

Lois spoke up. “But Netta, if they asked your professor to leave his position, he was probably much more deeply involved than just signing a petition. Why, he might have been a sleeper agent, teaching you Communist doctrine without you even realizing it!” Lois had read selected chapters from J. Edgar Hoover’s masterly Masters of Deceit her sophomore year and had been vigilant about the Communist conspiracy ever since.

“It was a class called ‘Math Methods for Junior Learners,'”said Netta dryly. “If he could squeeze any Communist doctrine into that, he deserved a prize.”

Lois is so quick to believe anything that she would have been an ideal party member in 1984. Her paranoia, though, is pretty funny. She even believes smoking some weed will land you in the hospital addicted to heroin.

The author doesn’t shy away from Lois getting intimate with many women (while still not realizing she’s a lesbian). The scenes are mostly described as kissing and biting and touching breasts; nothing overly graphic is described in detail. Serious intimacy is loving and sensual. The less serious intimate situations are funny; women try to be super sexy by asking Lois about typing or filing as foreplay. Lois loves secretarial duties more than anyone you’ve ever met; she even files when she’s upset!

Finally, the book does something that caused me to be incapable of putting down any R.L. Stein book ever: it has cliffhanger chapters. Something is always suspicious or surprising in the last line, which made me feel like I was right back to when I was younger and snuggled into books like they were bean bag chairs.

I’m excited to read the next three books in the Lesbian Career Girl series. Both Dolly Dingle and Maxie Mainwaring are characters in Lois Lenz that I liked who will get their own books.

This review was originally published at Grab the Lapels. Go to this review to see images of some pulp covers of bygone years!

[Marie-Therese · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well! What a delightful surprise!

I was feeling a bit down in the dumps contemplating the profound mediocrity of the Booker shortlist (all the good stuff was cut-pah!) and decided I needed something light and fluffy and completely without aspirations to great literature to salve my tired, chafed soul. I picked this out of my ever-growing ebook pile and I am so glad I did!

Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary is both a gentle send-up and a loving homage to the pulp lesbian novels of the American 1950s and 60s. Cheer squad captain, Lois Lenz, is an ace student, a whiz at organization, and the second most popular girl at her suburban high school (her chère amie, affluent blond bombshell Faye, is the most popular girl). Faye has post-graduation plans for herself and Lois, plans that include going to junior college, marrying their perennial double dates, Rod and Billy, and keeping their clandestine "kissing practice" going indefinitely. But fate intervenes! And Lois ends up in the big city that is Bay City. At an all-girls boarding house with a distinctly queer set of housemates. Before you know it, naïve young Lois, a gal who confuses the "twilight world" with pregnancy's "twilight sleep", is a confirmed career girl and up to her eyeballs in lesbian intrigue. The mystery is very slight but it's presented in such a playful way (think Scooby Doo here and you won't be too far off), that the lack of complexity hardly matters. This is just a really fun, frothy book that both sympathizes with and pokes gentle fun at the pulp fiction lesbian authors churned out in the middle decades of the last century in a somewhat vain and often compromised attempt at recognition and which scores of lesbian readers snatched up and clutched to their bosoms in feverish delight that anyone anywhere saw them as heroines of their own stories. Unlike so many of those original pulp novels though, this one has a happy ending and no one feels the need to eschew her true feelings to make society more comfortable.

I can't wait to read the next three books in the Career Girls series!

[Sheila · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a delightful tongue-in-cheek sendup of 50s pulp novels. Small-town girl Lois Lenz goes to the big city, gets a job at an advertising firm, and moves in to a run-down boardinghouse filled with eccentric characters. But in addition to the standard mysteries (the Red Threat! mysterious notes! an unstandard filing system!), she has to deal with the preponderance of attractive women everywhere she turns. What are these strange feelings she has, and why do girls keep kissing her?

Also, it contains the line, "Give me that file, you meddling typist!" which never fails to crack me up.

[Chance Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who would have guessed I'd be so excited to be welcomed to the secret world of lesbian career girls?

The front and back cover of the book tell you all you need to know about Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary: "Her soul was pure. Her desires were sinful. Her typing was impeccable." And, "Wild Women! Lurid Adventures! Shocking Desires! And a Lot of Filing!"

The book works because it reads more like an earnest tribute to pulp novels (which I have never read) than a parody. But the pulp genre is kind of a parody of itself, isn't it? Although there are self-aware jokes early on, like Faye's plan to throw a party in Daddy's new fallout shelter, the rest of the book feels like it could have been written in the 1950s.

Lois is an earnest cheerleader who gets a secretarial job in bustling Bay City, a city where her mother fears little naive Lois will be kidnapped by white slavers! Also, Lois's friend Faye is the bossy popular girl, a girl whose popularity comes from being bossy and taking control of Lois's life! Will Lois cave in to the seductive Faye and stay in backwater Walnut Grove, or will she move to Bay City? Faye has Lois's life all planned out for her: they can marry their respective beaus and live next door to one another, continuing their lesbian experimentation when their husbands are away on business. "Lois liked Billy, but she'd rather be kidnapped by white slavers than marry him just yet!"

Of course Lois goes to Bay City where she sleeps in a boarding house full of lesbians at night and works at the ad agency Sather & Stirling during the day. It's interesting that this book was published the same month Mad Men, with its Stirling Cooper ad agency. Lois Lenz Lesbian Secretary is much more fun and intriguing book than your average episode of Mad Men, mainly because there are hardly any men in it. Lois's boyfriend, Billy, is actually using Lois as a beard. He isn't gay, but in an interracial relationship! Scandalous!

Speaking of scandal, Lois's fears of the big city's seedy underbelly of Communists and reefer come true! Not just running gags, these elements eventually factor into the plot, giving it a tight feel. Contributing to the book's fast pace are the ingenious cliffhangers at the end of every chapter. When a chapter ends, "Lois's sigh turned into a gasp when she Mrs. Pierson standing with her hands on her hips, glaring at Lois like a gorgon!" how can you not go on?!

Plus the gags on the front and back about typing and filing are also critical to the plot. Lois finds herself embroiled in the machinations of a lesbian blackmailer! "Today's secretary needs to be a bit of a cryptographer!" Lois marvels, as her filing skills are the key to the mystery. Plus, Lois's lesbian encounters are fun and steamy, especially when her secretarial skills are used as an aphrodisiac. Her power-hungry boss demands a role reversal. "Type!" Lois gasped. "Type an urgent memo as fast you can!" Or when seduced by a copywriter who whispers huskily to Lois, "Tell me about your favorite filing system."

It's a fantasy world, sure, where everyone is a lesbian and nothing bad really happens, but it's fun to engage in, and all the characters have heart. Throughout it all, Lois remains steadfastly naive and demure. When chastised by her boss for being late, Lois almost cries. "She couldn't believe this was happening to her, Lois Lenz, winner of the perfect attendance award three years in a row!"

How will Lois get herself out of this mess? Who has ransacked the filing room? Who attended secret communist meetings? And are those marijuana cigarettes in Lois's desk drawer?! You'll have to read Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary to find out.

(P.S. I should start reading Entertainment Weekly book reviews more often. I first saw this book reviewed in the magazine when it came out, in 2007, and I finally read it! It's a weird place for book reviews, but many of the most entertaining books I read (The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise comes to mind) I heard about first in the magazine.)

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was the perfect thing to read after Pillars of the Earth. If I have one problem with books, it's that I read a really great book and then I want to read another really great book JUST like it. Sometimes the second book lives up to it and sometimes that second book is okay, but would have been better if I hadn't read it right after finishing up a really great book. I'm trying to learn from my mistakes have have a bit of literary palette cleanser.

This book made a perfect palette cleanser to Pillars of the Earth. The only thing the really have in common is that they are both entertaining. Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary was a bit of a silly mystery of "Lesbian career girls" in the 1950s. The tone was light and a bit fluffy and everything seemed a bit tongue in cheek.

[Cara · Rating 3 out of 5]

A guilty pleasure of mine is lesbian pulp fiction. I love the drama. This is the first modern [(c)2007] pulp novel I have read and thought it was good enough not to take a year to never finish it. :)
I liked her sexual descriptions which is rarely the case for me in any lesbian erotic writings. As in all lesbian pulp fiction there is the essence of b-grade to it which I expect and enjoy, but at times [very few times] it felt a little empty and/or rushed. I'll read another.

[Professor Ratigon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Netflix should have made this book into a comedy rom-com like Friends (lesbian version) because all these characters are too unique on their own, lol.

Praise for the “Lesbian Career Girls” aka. “Man-hating neurotics” lmao.

[Kat]

Lezzie pulp.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

TEN STARS. TWENTY.

[Ambrosia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three stars on its own, with an extra star added for being a spot-on parody.

Parody is a deceptively tough genre. Far too many authors (of novels and screenplays alike) seem to think that it's perfectly okay to just write a send-up of their target, without adding anything new or allowing their work to stand on its own (viz. the entire Scary Movie franchise and all of its associated works). And while such works are good for the occasional laugh, basically they boil down to an extended session of "Hey, remember this? Wasn't it silly?" without giving us any particular reason as to why it was silly. The best parodies are stories in themselves that include some kind of twist, creating a work that stands on its own while simultaneously reflecting some absurdity about the original work, or even just everyday aspects of our culture.

It's a pleasant surprise, therefore, that Lois Lenz manages to stand on its own as a jolly-good-fun pulp mystery story, even if it occasionally wobbles under the load placed on it (there's just so much about 1950s culture to send up: Garden Clubs! Shocking Beat Poetry Meetings! Secret Communist Sympathies! The Exploitation of Young Career Girls in the Big City! The Dangers of Loose Women!). The author manages to use the sheer earnestness of her main character to advantage; the dedication of the story to its sheer silliness is impressive, and helps excuse the instances when she winks at the audience a little too broadly.

Not great literature, but certainly great fun.

[Jenny Yates · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short spoof is a hoot, and will have you chortling and reading lines out loud to your girlfriend. It’s all about a young innocent from a small town who, in spite of a pleasant life practicing kissing with her best cheerleader pal, decides she wants to go check out the big city, and gasp – have a career! The extremely well-organized (and proud of it) Lois eventually finds out that there are lesbians all around, and there are also a few dastardly schemes afoot. This will take you about as long to read as it took me to write this review.

[Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Supposed to be a satire of classic lesbian pulp fiction--but it doesn't quite deliver on the satire aspect. Cute story, and I see all the nods to well known lesbian pf--but it's not as successful as it could have been. It eventually falls into the trap of being a pf novel in and of itself, more or less abandoning the clever jabs of the first third of the book. Entertaining, but not memorable.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Commies, beatniks, reefer, and lesbian career girls. Lois has to find her way in big Bay city and the women of the Magdelena Arms residence guide her way. This is pitch perfect pulp with some excellent humor.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is hysterically funny. With bonus erotic scenes as well as Bay Area references. I haven't yet met Monica Nolan, but I think I'm in love.

[Vance · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's just what I wanted it to be: a smart, spot-on (and loving) parody of the Ann Bannon books. This would make a fun film but I doubt anyone would ever greenlight it.

[Rebeka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Silly! I wish I'd had it when I was in high school...

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lois is a sweet innocent cheerleader from a small town. Her favourite things are organising/filing and "practicing" kissing with her best friend. She persuades her mum she will be safe from communists and "white slavers" in the big city by staying at a women only boarding house. The word "lesbian" is right there in the title so you can imagine the hi-jinx that ensue. Oh yeah BTW all career girls are always already lesbians.

Quite a funny book, tongue firmly in cheek at all times. Just don't take anything in it seriously and you'll be right. I might read more from this author.

[Louis · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's quite apt that I was watching season one of Mad Men as I was reading this. Both are 1950s references trying to decide whether they're being kitsch or ironic.

It's funny how some parodies manage to do the genre better than any of the originals. This is obviously over the top (the overuse of the ironic adjective 'gay' to describe vibrant colours, the excitement with which Lois approaches her career, etc.) and yet, like Tarantino's movies, goes a small way to allowing an oft-dismissed genre to be re-evaluated.

But god, the density of the main character is damn frustrating! She's a lesbian but she doesn't realise it, and she lives with a bunch of lesbians, but she doesn't realise that either. She's constantly hit on by girls, but never realises it. It's a kind of Queer-as-Folk fantasy world where no-one is heterosexual. I still managed to power through most of it in one night. Helped a little by too much tea.

It probably doesn't deserve four stars, but dammit, I enjoyed it.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely hilarious! Along the lines of Kiss the Girls and Make Them Spy, the book takes you into the secret world of Lesbian Career Women in 1950s urban Middle America and reveals many details of the sordid lifestyles these young women dared to choose. And more of that farcical take on lesbian pulp cum 50s anti-Communist anti-vice propaganda can be found in the book. Wonderful, laugh-out-loud queer entertainment.

[Starfish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read while visiting Louis!

This was just a really fun book, plain and simple. It doesn't try to be clever, and while I know that Louis found the tone grating after a bit and didn't enjoy the cliches, me, well, I just found those aspects added to it. If it had been longer, I think Lois would have got annoying (too naive!) but for me this book worked, and worked well.

[Cori · Rating 4 out of 5]

How fun!

[GK · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting pulp novel; quick read.

[Jamie]

Interested in seeing this updated take on lesbian pulp fiction.

[Summer Waldron · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was just an adorable, fun, campy good read. If 'Mad Men' was casted completely by lesbians, this is what you would get, and I just loved it. Great summer read!

[Lila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Campy and fun take on career girl fiction from the '50s. My book club had the author over to discuss the book which of course made the experience even more fun and memorable.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious! Contemporary book written like the pulp lesbian novels of the 50s. Brilliantly done.

[South Regional Durham County Libraries]

Great pulp fiction!

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Terrific pulp novel of a small-town girl who goes to the big city to become a "Lesbian career girl." Jolly good fun.