Judith Frank
that's it. I soldiered on for book club but am ditching this afterof itspages, I have suffered enough tedious detail and bouncing around different characters' heads,
It's a shame as the book tries to explore some interesting themes of race, class, butch identity, butch/femme dynamics and the effects of adult illiteracy.
My opinion, and others in book club differed, is that the writing is just too amateur to do these justice, I found this book frustrating because it had so much potential yet needed so much work, I think it would've been fulfilling to be her editor and be the one to say "Great characterization, but we don't need so much backstory on every character" or "I can't tell what's going on in this chapter where you don't use any names.
" It felt like the flaws in her writing were concrete and fixable, whereas the stuff that can't be taught she's got, Her characters are multifaceted, you can see how they come across differently in different settings and how they can mean well but rub each other the wrong way, how someone can be suave in one context and prickly in another.
But there was so much unnecessary, boring side plot, so much tellingnotshowing about all the minor characters, too many minor characters, . . it just needed a lot of cleaning up, Also, while I loved the premise of an oldschool butch interacting with a younger butch, it seemed that their friction was all about social class and not about the ways butch identities have changed.
Thinking of rereading this book soon, I remember it giving me a sense of normalcy, like a slice of life kind of book, that wasnt overbearingly heavy, Kind of a surprisingly light breath of air, especially when compared to other lesbian novels set in a similar period
in time, Bittersweet, honest, and very good for reminding me of things I love about butches as a femme myself Drawing on her experience as an adult literacy tutor, Judith Frank's first novel traces the difficult and sometimes hilarious connection between two butches of different generations a middleclass, thirtysomething adult literacy teacher and her older, workingclass student.
With a disparate group of adult learners as the backdrop, Frank examines, with warmth and wit, the relationship between education and gender, class, and racial identity.
This one isn't doing it for me, Maybe I'll try again another time, Another one for the book club, Unfortunately, I didn't finish in time and after we all discussed it I put it back on the shelf obviously it didn't have too much of a pull.
. . In an attempt to finish all my half started books this year I finished itmonths later, I'm glad I did too because the people in the book remind me of how I don't want to be, There were so many different points of view it all seemed a bit jumbled in the end, It was a sneak peek into people's lives where the ending doesn't come together perfectly, That might be what I liked most! I'm not sure about this one, . . It took me almostyears to FINALLY finish this book and now I remember why, . . what a jumble of characters and boring, mundane situations, Also, Anna and Chris were extremely unlikeable and generally shitty human beings whose odd relationship just fizzled on the page, Most of the characters and there were way too many were unlikeable, I found the story jumped around too much and was a hot mess of painfully boring descriptions, This couldve used an editor, The best fiction I've read that zeroes in on class and race from a white Jewish person's perspective, The main character, Anna, is a butch Jewish lesbian in her first year of teaching adults to read, She was born upper middleclass but, despite her PhD, she's living lower middleclass because she can't get an academic job, We learn a lot about the principles and methods of adult basic education, and since I was once a literacy tutor, that interested me in itself.
Most of Anna's students are people of color and poor, Here's how far the author's consciousness has been raised: she has Anna reflect on why she chose to read Bastard Out of Carolina to the class, not Push.
But Anna makes some naive mistakes, especially with Chris, a white workingclass bulldagger who came of age in the's, We learn all about Chris's life, too in fact, it may be fair to say that Anna and Chris are equally the protagonists and antagonists of the story.
Butchonbutch action.
To give us a sense of the other students, now and then the author slides in and out of their heads, short shifts of point of view that arrive unexpectedly but are handled expertly.
The book contains just overpages of small print, and it feels long, There's too much detail of things like showers and coffee drinking, and a couple of characters could have been dropped or combined, Otherwise, it's an impressive and thoroughly enjoyable achievement, The plot is much richer than I can convey here, Winner of theLambda Award for Debut Lesbian Fiction,
remembering I read this a long time ago, Judy was my advisor in college, so I am really interested to see what this is like, . . I used to love it when she would make all sorts of references to Leave It To Beaver and the Mets in her Politics of the Gothic in the English novel class.
. . Judith Frank holds a BA from the Hebrew University, and an MFA and PhD from Cornell University, She is the author of Crybaby Butch Firebrand Books,, which was awarded a Lambda Literary Award in, Inshe received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for All I Love and Know, She has been a resident at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and has published short fiction in The Massachusetts , other voices, and Best Lesbian Love Stories.
She teaches English and creative writing at Amherst College, and lives with her partner and two children in Amherst, MA, .
It's a shame as the book tries to explore some interesting themes of race, class, butch identity, butch/femme dynamics and the effects of adult illiteracy.
My opinion, and others in book club differed, is that the writing is just too amateur to do these justice, I found this book frustrating because it had so much potential yet needed so much work, I think it would've been fulfilling to be her editor and be the one to say "Great characterization, but we don't need so much backstory on every character" or "I can't tell what's going on in this chapter where you don't use any names.
" It felt like the flaws in her writing were concrete and fixable, whereas the stuff that can't be taught she's got, Her characters are multifaceted, you can see how they come across differently in different settings and how they can mean well but rub each other the wrong way, how someone can be suave in one context and prickly in another.
But there was so much unnecessary, boring side plot, so much tellingnotshowing about all the minor characters, too many minor characters, . . it just needed a lot of cleaning up, Also, while I loved the premise of an oldschool butch interacting with a younger butch, it seemed that their friction was all about social class and not about the ways butch identities have changed.
Thinking of rereading this book soon, I remember it giving me a sense of normalcy, like a slice of life kind of book, that wasnt overbearingly heavy, Kind of a surprisingly light breath of air, especially when compared to other lesbian novels set in a similar period
in time, Bittersweet, honest, and very good for reminding me of things I love about butches as a femme myself Drawing on her experience as an adult literacy tutor, Judith Frank's first novel traces the difficult and sometimes hilarious connection between two butches of different generations a middleclass, thirtysomething adult literacy teacher and her older, workingclass student.
With a disparate group of adult learners as the backdrop, Frank examines, with warmth and wit, the relationship between education and gender, class, and racial identity.
With Crybaby Butch, Judith Frank creates a deeply human, bravely unsentimental story while at the same time investigating the meaning of butch identity as it reinvents itself from one generation to the next.
Carol Anshaw
Fearless and unflinching, Crybaby Butch rigorously explores butch/femme dynamics over two generations, Judy Frank's debut novel is searing and memorable, Claire Messud
Follow on the heels of Stone Butch Blues, It's a nice enough story and brings up the important issue of the disconnect between older and younger generations in the queer community, but you could do better.This one isn't doing it for me, Maybe I'll try again another time, Another one for the book club, Unfortunately, I didn't finish in time and after we all discussed it I put it back on the shelf obviously it didn't have too much of a pull.
. . In an attempt to finish all my half started books this year I finished itmonths later, I'm glad I did too because the people in the book remind me of how I don't want to be, There were so many different points of view it all seemed a bit jumbled in the end, It was a sneak peek into people's lives where the ending doesn't come together perfectly, That might be what I liked most! I'm not sure about this one, . . It took me almostyears to FINALLY finish this book and now I remember why, . . what a jumble of characters and boring, mundane situations, Also, Anna and Chris were extremely unlikeable and generally shitty human beings whose odd relationship just fizzled on the page, Most of the characters and there were way too many were unlikeable, I found the story jumped around too much and was a hot mess of painfully boring descriptions, This couldve used an editor, The best fiction I've read that zeroes in on class and race from a white Jewish person's perspective, The main character, Anna, is a butch Jewish lesbian in her first year of teaching adults to read, She was born upper middleclass but, despite her PhD, she's living lower middleclass because she can't get an academic job, We learn a lot about the principles and methods of adult basic education, and since I was once a literacy tutor, that interested me in itself.
Most of Anna's students are people of color and poor, Here's how far the author's consciousness has been raised: she has Anna reflect on why she chose to read Bastard Out of Carolina to the class, not Push.
But Anna makes some naive mistakes, especially with Chris, a white workingclass bulldagger who came of age in the's, We learn all about Chris's life, too in fact, it may be fair to say that Anna and Chris are equally the protagonists and antagonists of the story.
Butchonbutch action.
To give us a sense of the other students, now and then the author slides in and out of their heads, short shifts of point of view that arrive unexpectedly but are handled expertly.
The book contains just overpages of small print, and it feels long, There's too much detail of things like showers and coffee drinking, and a couple of characters could have been dropped or combined, Otherwise, it's an impressive and thoroughly enjoyable achievement, The plot is much richer than I can convey here, Winner of theLambda Award for Debut Lesbian Fiction,
remembering I read this a long time ago, Judy was my advisor in college, so I am really interested to see what this is like, . . I used to love it when she would make all sorts of references to Leave It To Beaver and the Mets in her Politics of the Gothic in the English novel class.
. . Judith Frank holds a BA from the Hebrew University, and an MFA and PhD from Cornell University, She is the author of Crybaby Butch Firebrand Books,, which was awarded a Lambda Literary Award in, Inshe received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for All I Love and Know, She has been a resident at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and has published short fiction in The Massachusetts , other voices, and Best Lesbian Love Stories.
She teaches English and creative writing at Amherst College, and lives with her partner and two children in Amherst, MA, .