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Lenswoman in Love: a novel of the 1960s & '70s
320 pages, Paperback
Published February 24, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 20, 2025
Step back in time to a world without cell phones, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Back to the era of the 1960s and 70s, when hippies, the women’s movement, and riots were typical. Maddy is a young girl growing up in this time of change, and she is looking at it all through her camera lens.
Maddy starts her journey in 1967 in Century City, CA, at a police riot. She could never imagine this would be the start of her journey looking through her camera lens. It will introduce her to Jake, her secret crush, beautiful places such as London, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Pakistan, Jamaica, and many more. She will gain life lessons, experience heartache, and discover challenges that test her strength. However, she will learn from it all, teaching her that life isn’t always fair or safe.
Lenswoman in Love: A Novel of the 1960s and ’70s by Kim Gottlieb-Walker will take you back in time to the era of Janis Joplin, Bob Marley, and Jimi Hendrix. When women were fighting for the rights of their bodies, and men were fighting for the right to stay alive. Walker paints a beautiful picture of how far we all have come in today’s world and what women had to endure in the past.
As I read this book and thought about all the towns, countries, and cities in it, I found myself fully immersed in that time frame. Gottlieb-Walker has traveled extensively, and this book shows that on every page. I could imagine standing next to peace marchers and helping support their cause, while feeling anger for the police brutality that had been forced upon them.
Being born in the ’70s, I was very young when the world was alive with mushroom clouds exploding, and Barry Goldwater was airing his political commercials. I didn’t witness Nazis, Klansmen, and segregation. However, reading this book helped me understand that period and how those who came before me fought for the rights I enjoy today.
Kim Gottlieb-Walker has poured her heart into a novel that reads like a biography. Within the pages, she portrays the world of music, political issues, and her love of photography as she sees them. Lenswoman in Love deserves high praise. It is a five-star novel, and I am privileged to have read it.
Maddy starts her journey in 1967 in Century City, CA, at a police riot. She could never imagine this would be the start of her journey looking through her camera lens. It will introduce her to Jake, her secret crush, beautiful places such as London, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Pakistan, Jamaica, and many more. She will gain life lessons, experience heartache, and discover challenges that test her strength. However, she will learn from it all, teaching her that life isn’t always fair or safe.
Lenswoman in Love: A Novel of the 1960s and ’70s by Kim Gottlieb-Walker will take you back in time to the era of Janis Joplin, Bob Marley, and Jimi Hendrix. When women were fighting for the rights of their bodies, and men were fighting for the right to stay alive. Walker paints a beautiful picture of how far we all have come in today’s world and what women had to endure in the past.
As I read this book and thought about all the towns, countries, and cities in it, I found myself fully immersed in that time frame. Gottlieb-Walker has traveled extensively, and this book shows that on every page. I could imagine standing next to peace marchers and helping support their cause, while feeling anger for the police brutality that had been forced upon them.
Being born in the ’70s, I was very young when the world was alive with mushroom clouds exploding, and Barry Goldwater was airing his political commercials. I didn’t witness Nazis, Klansmen, and segregation. However, reading this book helped me understand that period and how those who came before me fought for the rights I enjoy today.
Kim Gottlieb-Walker has poured her heart into a novel that reads like a biography. Within the pages, she portrays the world of music, political issues, and her love of photography as she sees them. Lenswoman in Love deserves high praise. It is a five-star novel, and I am privileged to have read it.
April 10, 2025
"Lenswoman in Love: A Novel of the 1960s & 70s" by Kim Gottlieb-Walker
"Lenswoman in Love" drops you into the middle of the iconic 1960s as high school student Maddy Garfield transitions from high school to college. When riveting Jake Morgenstern takes a job at her mother’s folk music venue, Maddy falls hard. After begging him to give her a kissing lesson, she’s hooked. Jake exits quickly, since she’s still in high school.
Maddy’s photography skills lead to a cinematography major and she shoots events which will place you in the middle of the action from sit-ins to love-ins and from police riots to concerts. She and Jake’s paths diverge, merge in college for a short time and diverge again. We follow Maddy through the trials of breaking into the movie industry as a still photographer and traveling around the world. Her adventures exploring this turbulent period takes us on a walk into the past and all it has to offer.
Will Maddy have the courage to tell Jake how she feels when she’s hired for his next film? If you grew up during this time, you’ll recognize the names and places. Kim pulls from her vast knowledge of movie productions and life experiences to tell an unforgettable story of a young woman falling in love with one certain man. What happens will keep you reading into the night.
I gave "Lenswoman in Love" a Groovy 5 Stars!
"Lenswoman in Love" drops you into the middle of the iconic 1960s as high school student Maddy Garfield transitions from high school to college. When riveting Jake Morgenstern takes a job at her mother’s folk music venue, Maddy falls hard. After begging him to give her a kissing lesson, she’s hooked. Jake exits quickly, since she’s still in high school.
Maddy’s photography skills lead to a cinematography major and she shoots events which will place you in the middle of the action from sit-ins to love-ins and from police riots to concerts. She and Jake’s paths diverge, merge in college for a short time and diverge again. We follow Maddy through the trials of breaking into the movie industry as a still photographer and traveling around the world. Her adventures exploring this turbulent period takes us on a walk into the past and all it has to offer.
Will Maddy have the courage to tell Jake how she feels when she’s hired for his next film? If you grew up during this time, you’ll recognize the names and places. Kim pulls from her vast knowledge of movie productions and life experiences to tell an unforgettable story of a young woman falling in love with one certain man. What happens will keep you reading into the night.
I gave "Lenswoman in Love" a Groovy 5 Stars!
February 17, 2026
Lenswoman in Love is a historical romance by Kim Gottlieb-Walker. We are introduced to Maddy Garfield as a teenager at some point after her father dies. Her mother owns a bar where folk musicians play and hires a college kid working arely ifor a degree in film for the summer to help out. Maddy, known as Garfield to the new hire, Jake, falls madly and deeply in love. But the age different is too great, and Jake heads back to school early. Maddy never forgets him and spends her days comparing others to him. And they always come up short. In the meantime, she becomes a photographer and scrabbles her way up the ladder, slowly capturing stories and people - occasionally finding her way into Jake's circle.
This story is filled to the brim with musical and film references, as well as the unrest of the 60s and 70s. Vietnam? It's in there. Nuclear plants? Yep. Bob Marley? The Beatles? Hippes? College protests? And so much more. These references land the book squarely in historical fiction, though it pains me that these decades are considered historical. However, Maddy's deep and abiding love for a man she barely knows puts the book into the romantic realm. And Kim balances the two with ease.
I enjoyed the book thoroughly, and think you will, too!
This story is filled to the brim with musical and film references, as well as the unrest of the 60s and 70s. Vietnam? It's in there. Nuclear plants? Yep. Bob Marley? The Beatles? Hippes? College protests? And so much more. These references land the book squarely in historical fiction, though it pains me that these decades are considered historical. However, Maddy's deep and abiding love for a man she barely knows puts the book into the romantic realm. And Kim balances the two with ease.
I enjoyed the book thoroughly, and think you will, too!
March 8, 2025
If you never experienced the excitement and frenzy of the 60s and 70s, LENSWOMAN IN LOVE will take you there. The riots, the music, the drugs--but most of all the passionate love affair between Maddy and Jake will not let you put this book down. Highly recommended.
JoAnn Catania, Author of A SCARCITY OF VIRGINS
JoAnn Catania, Author of A SCARCITY OF VIRGINS
March 28, 2026
Lenswoman in Love follows Maddy, a gifted young photographer coming of age in the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, as she moves through Berkeley activism, UCLA film culture, music scenes, political awakening, and an enduring, half-tormenting, half-sustaining love for Jake. What struck me most is that the novel isn’t just built around romance. It’s really about a sensibility forming under pressure: grief after her father’s death, the thrill of learning to see through a lens, the moral charge of documenting history, and the slow, uneven process of becoming herself. The early material alone gives that shape vividly, from Maddy filming police violence at an antiwar protest, to photographing the Free Speech Movement, to meeting Jake at her family’s folk club, where art, politics, and desire begin to tangle together in ways that define the rest of her life.
I liked the writing for its warmth and immediacy. Author Kim Gottlieb-Walker has a way of narrating feelings that is unabashedly romantic without becoming weightless. Maddy’s first attraction to Jake has that feverish, slightly humiliating intensity that actual young longing has. It’s not cleaned up for elegance. It blushes, stumbles, aches. I especially liked the scenes in which emotional awakening and artistic awakening mirror each other: the moment Jake opens her ears to electric music after she dismisses it as unserious, the candlelit Bob Dylan sighting, the way she notices faces, light, posture, gesture before she fully knows what any of it means. Those moments make the book feel less like a conventional love story than a record of consciousness being sharpened. The prose can be earnest, and at times that earnestness edges close to old-fashioned, but in this case, I found that more affecting than limiting.
I was more interested in the book’s ideas than in its romance, which is saying something because Jake is very skillfully drawn as a formative figure. The novel keeps circling back to a tension that feels genuinely alive: how a woman can be swept up in love without surrendering the self she is still building. Maddy’s mother gives some of the book’s wisest emotional counterweight when she insists that women don’t need men to be complete and warns her daughter not to kiss every clever frog. That note matters because the novel is clearly fascinated by longing, but it doesn’t finally confuse longing with fulfillment. I also admired the way politics are woven into the fabric of personal memory rather than pinned on as historical decoration. Andy Goodman’s murder, the antiwar marches, the police brutality, the sense that art can bear witness, all of that gives the book a pulse beyond nostalgia. I think the novel’s closeness to lived experience is both its strength. It produces texture, conviction, and vivid social detail.
Lenswoman in Love is appealing because it knows that youth is rarely one clean story. It’s heartbreak and glamour, self-invention and confusion, politics and vanity, courage and naivete, all happening at once. I came away feeling that the novel’s real subject is not simply whether Maddy and Jake belong together, but how a woman learns to trust her eye, her appetite, and her own unfolding life. I’d recommend it especially to readers who enjoy coming-of-age fiction, artist-novels, and period stories that care as much about atmosphere and inner weather as plot. It’s a tender, intelligent book for anyone who has ever fallen in love while trying, at the same time, to become a person.
I liked the writing for its warmth and immediacy. Author Kim Gottlieb-Walker has a way of narrating feelings that is unabashedly romantic without becoming weightless. Maddy’s first attraction to Jake has that feverish, slightly humiliating intensity that actual young longing has. It’s not cleaned up for elegance. It blushes, stumbles, aches. I especially liked the scenes in which emotional awakening and artistic awakening mirror each other: the moment Jake opens her ears to electric music after she dismisses it as unserious, the candlelit Bob Dylan sighting, the way she notices faces, light, posture, gesture before she fully knows what any of it means. Those moments make the book feel less like a conventional love story than a record of consciousness being sharpened. The prose can be earnest, and at times that earnestness edges close to old-fashioned, but in this case, I found that more affecting than limiting.
I was more interested in the book’s ideas than in its romance, which is saying something because Jake is very skillfully drawn as a formative figure. The novel keeps circling back to a tension that feels genuinely alive: how a woman can be swept up in love without surrendering the self she is still building. Maddy’s mother gives some of the book’s wisest emotional counterweight when she insists that women don’t need men to be complete and warns her daughter not to kiss every clever frog. That note matters because the novel is clearly fascinated by longing, but it doesn’t finally confuse longing with fulfillment. I also admired the way politics are woven into the fabric of personal memory rather than pinned on as historical decoration. Andy Goodman’s murder, the antiwar marches, the police brutality, the sense that art can bear witness, all of that gives the book a pulse beyond nostalgia. I think the novel’s closeness to lived experience is both its strength. It produces texture, conviction, and vivid social detail.
Lenswoman in Love is appealing because it knows that youth is rarely one clean story. It’s heartbreak and glamour, self-invention and confusion, politics and vanity, courage and naivete, all happening at once. I came away feeling that the novel’s real subject is not simply whether Maddy and Jake belong together, but how a woman learns to trust her eye, her appetite, and her own unfolding life. I’d recommend it especially to readers who enjoy coming-of-age fiction, artist-novels, and period stories that care as much about atmosphere and inner weather as plot. It’s a tender, intelligent book for anyone who has ever fallen in love while trying, at the same time, to become a person.
June 4, 2025
Lenswoman in Love is set in the late 1960s and early1970s, years that included my college time. This has become an increasingly popular era for women’s fiction and this novel really took me back to my youth (although I am afraid I was far more conventional than the heroine, Maddy). The author, Kim Gottlieb-Walker is known for her photography documenting political demonstrations, rock stars, and work on film and TV sets resulting in two previously published glossy books of her work. Her experiences clearly inform the story of Maddy Garfield, an adventurous and spunky young photographer navigating the world of flower children and Hollywood. For fans of romance, Maddy grows into a fitting partner for her long-term love interest, Jake. The author keeps us in suspense about whether Maddy will get her man. All I will say is that the ending satisfies the reader! It was fun to be reminded of those days and young women now will enjoy hearing about the Age of Aquarius.
October 26, 2025
This book is a total immersion experience in the culture and chaos of the 1960s and ’70s. Through the eyes of fearless young photographer Maddy Garfield, you’re transported into a world of riots, rock stars, and restless creativity. As you turn the pages, you can almost hear the soundtrack of the times — The Grateful Dead, Bob Marley, Jim Morrison, and more. You may even find yourself pausing to play those songs again, just to stay in the moment a little longer.
Maddy’s camera captures the icons of a generation in flux, while the thread running through it all is an epic love story. Lenswoman in Love isn’t just a novel; it’s a time machine for anyone who lived through those years. As soon as I put the book down, I thought of all the people I was going to gift it to who are nostalgic for a time when music, love, and rebellion changed the world.
Maddy’s camera captures the icons of a generation in flux, while the thread running through it all is an epic love story. Lenswoman in Love isn’t just a novel; it’s a time machine for anyone who lived through those years. As soon as I put the book down, I thought of all the people I was going to gift it to who are nostalgic for a time when music, love, and rebellion changed the world.
March 24, 2025
This book immediately transported me to the era of the summer of love. It resonated with me as only a trip back in time to your youth can do. It revealed the inside of the rock and roll and movie industries as only an insider can. And the ribbon tying it all together is a roller coaster of a love story. This book has it all.
May 13, 2025
With the soul of a memoir and the pulse of a cultural time capsule, 'Lenswoman in Love' transports readers to the heart of the '60s and '70s through the eyes of a young woman finding her voice behind the lens. Kim Gottlieb-Walker captures the era’s music, politics, and passion with the same clarity and depth that define her iconic photographs. A vivid, heartfelt debut.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews