Fiction. LGBT Studies. Finalist for the American Library Association GLBT Fiction Award. "Guess deftly performs the parlor trick of handling several different voices, switching fluidly from perceptive Caddie to the clipped cadence of masculine Jo to jaded Selena. This Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore for the 1990s celebrates the differences between people without fudging the loneliness that these entail. Guess's attempts to put a Midwestern spin on magical realism are blessedly in a book loaded with so many natural surprises, any supernatural extras would be gilt on the lily"— Publishers Weekly .
A "pansexual anthem," perhaps. This book is beautiful and not in print anymore and will always be pigeonholed as a lesbian novel, and it is that, and also a working-class-Middle-America, getting-by-through-relishing-small-pleasures, everyone-has-secret-lives-and-loves novel. Knocked my proverbial socks off.
This odd novel is set in Cartwheel Indiana and most of it takes place in people's heads. Different characters speak, which I always like in a novel, but the main one is Caddie who works as a waitress in a unique diner. She falls for a womin living as a man. Guess is very good at giving us a peak into people's thoughts and emotions, and adept at presenting the unsettling in an ordinary manner, as you'll see when the book takes twists and turns unexpected.
The desolate, lost-in-nowhere, heteronormative small town America setting was so bleak that I couldn't get into the plot & gave up about half way through.