Olivia's Reviews > The Not Wives

3.5 stars rounded down for the lesbian representation.

I got this book a year or two ago from a bookstore owner in El Paso. He gave it to me for free because he’d asked what I’d read lately and I said I’d enjoyed /Girl, Woman, Other/. He said if that was the case I would like this one and the author had had an event there recently, so he had a bunch of other copies. I haven’t wanted to go to that bookstore until I finished it…

I can see where he was going with the split perspectives of the three women. However, Stevie gets way more protagonist energy than Mel or Joanna. She has the only first person narrative and their stories peter out in the last third or so. I did have my own experiences with Occupy when I was a college student in Portland that MAY have also included polyamorous anarchists/Marxists and consensus-based meetings that were not all together positive. That MAY have influenced the fact that this book sat on my bookshelf so so long.

The Occupy Movement was definitely a Moment in Time and it was good to get some perspective on how others may have experienced it. For a novel that is marketed as Queer, Queer, Queer! I was disappointed in how many of the relationships and sex scenes revolved around men. For the women lovers, we get a singular one night stand and a chronically-disappointed lesbian longterm partner with limited romance, sexiness, or character development. The line coming from Mel’s (bisexual tier-two protagonist’s) new male lover about fucking her so well that she’d never want fake dick again, followed by a sex scene with her primary female partner where she asks her to take off her harness especially rubbed me the wrong way. Yes, bisexuality is real and valid and those stories deserve to be told, but the woman/woman relationships in a novel that spans many romantic connections deserve just as much care and attention and hotness and development as the male/female ones.

THAT SAID. I still thought the book itself was pretty solid. A little literary but with effortless prose that makes it easy to turn the pages. Read it! Or don’t.