Rainbow Gap

1) Beautifully vivid depiction of Florida wildlife, terrain, weather, and the culture of Florida in the 1950s-1970s.

2) Lee Lynch is a superb practitioner of her craft. Memorable characters overcoming life’s big and little obstacles with dialog that vibrates with authenticity, and plainspoken brilliance, this is a charming love story.

2017 Rainbow Awards Honorable Mention

Rainbow Gap by Lee Lynch is a book so exquisite that I just want everyone to go read it. Like, seriously, stop reading this review, buy it and read it right now.

Jaudon Vicker and Berry Garland have always known they would be together, even when they were little girls holding hands on their way to school. Berry stuck up for Jaudon and comforted her when bullies made school too tough to handle, and Jaudon grounded Berry and gave her the family she needed after her parents left and never came back.

Coming of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s means both women are figuring out who they are against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the women’s lib movement. But no matter where their paths take them, with Jaudon increasingly investing herself in the family business and Berry trying to find herself spiritually and help vulnerable women, they’re always each other’s home.

The Characters are the Story
While a lot happens in Rainbow Gap, which isn’t surprising since it spans more than 15 years, there isn’t really a plot. That’s because Berry and Jaudon are the story, both as individuals and as a couple. We join them for periods in their life, seeing how they wrestle with their respective issues.

Berry grows from being Jaudon’s steady source of sweetness and light to a woman of grit and convictions, taking risks to help those working to advance women’s rights. Berry’s parents and their absence remain a constant in her mind, although the family she makes with Jaudon and her Gran soothes that anxiety. We watch Jaudon slowly grow more comfortable in her more masculine body, and while she carries the scars of bullying with her, Berry’s love helps her accept herself exactly as she is.

Jaudon and Berry are also joined by a cast of side characters who give texture to the story. Berry’s grandmother not only raises her, but eventually lives with the two leads, giving them both a loving, guiding presence. During their college years they make friends with Rigo, a fun loving gay man who’s a bigtime player. Through Berry’s involvement in the women’s lib movement they also make friends with other lesbians and straight women, and the tension between the two groups show how feminism isn’t always intersectional. Even the swamp where they live is its own character, so clearly drawn that it makes us feel like we’re there, listening to the frogs singing in the night.

This is Not a Romance Novel (in the Best Way)
Seriously. I just want to get that out there right away. Rainbow Gap doesn’t follow the convention of meet cute, flirting, sexy kissing (and/or sex), major conflict that leads to breakup, then make up for the happily ever after or happy for now. And yet, it’s a deeply romantic book that I would instead describe as a love story.

Berry and Jaudon are together from the beginning, with the first line telling us that “They started courting as schoolgirls in that fall of 1959, when they were eight.” They are the epitome of soulmates and my heart clenched every time an obstacle came into their path, whether it was the palpable, dangerous homophobia of the time, other women, or simply the fact that growing up changes who you are. Their public moments are bittersweet as they find ways to touch so that no one can see them, regularly reminding us that their love is illegal, no matter how beautiful it is.

Rainbow Gap is a Timely Book
So here’s the thing. I love a good romance, as you all know well because I fangirl about so many of them. But I love that lesbian fiction is more than just romance, even if it often all gets painted with the same brush. And like I said in my review of A Return to Arms, writing stories about women loving women was and continues to be a radical act. With the political climates being what they are in the US and many other parts of the world, we need books that celebrate love between two women, and I love that Lee Lynch gives us that while also challenging us to think about things like gender equality, homophobia, overreaching by the police, and racism.

Things are better now than they were in the 1970’s for many women, but the issues Jaudon, Berry and their friends face are highly relevant today. There’s a reason why 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ. And those rights that Berry and her women’s lib friends were fighting for are being stripped away by an administration that doesn’t give a damn about women, the LGBTQ community, or people of colour. Rainbow Gap gives us hope through Berry and Jaudon’s love as well as by giving us concrete examples of political action we can all take to make change in our communities to keep ourselves and our families safe.

The Conclusion
taras favourite lesbian booksI don’t know how I’ve never read anything by Lee Lynch before, because now I just want to run out and buy her entire backlist. Rainbow Gap is not only a wonderful, moving book, it’s also an important book that should be required reading. Just like The Liberators of Willow Run, it reminds us that we’ve been here before and we can do this again. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Reviewed by The Lesbian Review

One of the first lesbian romance novels I bought was Lee Lynch’s That Old Studebaker, back when it was originally published, and I’ve been meaning to find out whether the author’s current works live up to the happy memories I have of that book. As with the previously mentioned book, Rainbow Gap focusses on lesbians growing up in less-than-glamourous surroundings and going on to have mundane but nonetheless important careers. By way of contrast to my memories of a coming-of-age novel, however, this book covers a broad period of lesbian history, seen through the eyes of two relatively ordinary women.

Jaudon Vicker and Berry Garland go to school together after Berry is abandoned by her parents to stay with her grandmother. Both come from families with considerable histories of living in their small South Florida community; although neither has a particularly well-off background, Jaudon’s parents – her mother in particular – work hard to make a success of their chain of grocery stores and to constantly extend and modernise their home. As the girls mature, they grow ever closer, spending much of their spare time in the treehouse on the Vickers' family property or out in the swamp around Berry’s grandmother’s home.

Although Berry could be one of the popular girls, she prefers to stay with Jaudon, who is bullied for the way she looks; when she is accepted onto a nursing course, she encourages Jaudon to take business classes so they can study together while Jaudon also manages one of her family’s stores. Berry makes friends, through her work and studies, with a number of lesbian and feminist activists; while Jaudon doesn’t always agree with their views, she respects Berry’s opinions and allows one of the women – a fugitive from the law – to stay with them, even though it places them both in jeopardy.

The path of true love doesn’t always run smooth – both heroines are tempted at times by other women – and Berry’s anti-war stance causes friction with Jaudon, when her brother is serving in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Jaudon faces opposition from her mother regarding the way she runs the store – particularly her hiring of African-American women to work there. Overall, though, this is a gentle book in which events unfold slowly (with one or two exceptions) and while the women’s circumstances change for the better, this happens only gradually.

A real feel-good novel: I can see I need to catch up with this author’s back catalogue.

Reviewed by Sandra Marlow

Jerry Garland and Jaudon Vicker live in the backcountry of Central Florida. Growing up as kids on the outskirts of this small town, they learn to deal with the homophobia as they develop from best friends to lovers.

Berry wants to be a nurse, and is attracted to the politics of feminism and the women pushing for change. Jaudon is dealing with her bullying mother, and wants to learn as much about business as she can so she can eventually take up the reins of the family retail business.

Along the way, the events of the 1960s and ‘70s impact on their lives, reaching in from around the globe to change everything, including how Berry and Jaudon see themselves, and their world.

Berry and Jaudon are interesting characters and Lynch places them in an unusual place to examine the events of this decade. I was a bit taken aback by the placement of the story within this tiny backwater, but quickly realized that the story was much more than the lesbian romance I was expecting. By placing the story in such a small town, Lynch allows us to see the full impact of that changing decade on those on the very fringes of the 1960s storm.

Lynch has created a very different way to tell the story of the growing understanding of feminism and queerness impacted on the lives of those who lived through such extraordinary change. Jaudon, the more cautious of the two, and Berry the more adventurous spiritually, enables Lynch to differentiate the paths of two very different women within this time of flux.

This is a complex story of how external ideas change a group of people, as the tentacles of a more complex understanding of the world reach in from outside a small town to paint in colour what had been black and white. Fascinating and evocative, this is an interesting book.

Reviewed by Pippa Wischer

Rainbow Gap - Lee LynchSometimes it is hard to write a review because you can’t find the words, in this case it’s hard to find words big enough to describe such an epic tale. Set in Florida in the 50’s and 60’s Lee Lynch has constructed a story that creates a movie style landscape in your mind.

It opens with the portrayal of two young school friends, one the circus freak with too much testosterone, the other the pretty girl who choses her friend above popularity. The plot is 15 years of simple day-to-day living, with their small personal dramas, but set in the midst of complex times that frequently touch their lives. A brother away in Vietnam, the first battles of women’s lib, the early stirrings of gay rights, the communist threat, and the on-going racial segregation all form a backdrop to the changing world around them.

Jaudon and Berry form an instant bond that in small town America in the 1950’s literally had no name. They forge a life together based on nothing more than their absolute belief that they belong. With no role models, no community and very little support they just ‘are’. Each step, from the first tentative kiss to finding their own place in the world, individually and as a couple, is an exploration of how to be.

The Florida swamp plays a powerful role in the novel, from how the girls grow up in the most basic of shacks to the ever-present voice of frogs and the bite of mosquitos. More than just setting the scene the landscape is a living being with a character and a sub-plot of its own, almost a will of its own, taking action in the lives of the families who carve out a life in the encroaching greenery and the overwhelming heat.

We meet a broad range of characters from the distant overachieving mother to the warm and loving gran, the gay boys who struggle to be themselves and a bunch of recognizable 1960's feminists beginning to fight for women’s rights. For anyone old enough to have lived through those heady days of the women’s groups and early gay community it rings so many bells. The strident activists, the surreptitious gatherings, the support and the angst of women learning the hard way how to fight for change.

This is both a coming out and growing up story, but also a timeless work of literary fiction, with classic writing that draws you into it’s world. The plot may be simple but the characters, interactions and subplots are the history of lives lived at a time when literally everything they did was unknowingly revolutionary.

Rainbow Gap will win awards across the board, and deservedly so. It is simple in plot, but complex in emotion. It is a genuine classic telling of nothing more or less than real life. More than anything it’s a story of the birth of our community and the fight to be openly who we are.

Reviewed by Velvet Lounger