Reviews for Zora in Florida

The average rating for Zora in Florida based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-02-18 00:00:00 Richard Oliver This is a great book for anyone who likes a bit of academia with their mystery fiction. It provides an excellent analysis of detective novels with gay or lesbian sleuths (both amateur and professional). Published in 2004, it provides details about characters, authors, sub-genres and also a more general background to the mystery genre. I really enjoyed reading this. I enjoy murder mysteries and in the last few years I have added many gay detective stories to my library. I haven't read many stories with lesbian detectives and this book has enabled me to identify some that I definitely want to explore. I appreciate the way this book explores the gay and lesbian crime-fiction scene and how this has developed over the years and its links to general mystery fiction. The book then goes into detailed analysis about the authors and their characters, and explores police, private investigators, professional sleuths and detecting partners. The book analyses many of my favourite characters including: Scotty Bradley and Chanse Macleod (Greg Herren), Stanley Kraychik (Grant Michael) Henry Rios (Michael Nava) Benjamin Justice (John Morgan Wilson) Adrien English (Josh Lanyon) And many other characters by authors such as. Mark Zubro Richards, Richard Stevenson, Steve Neil Johnson, Michael Craft, Dean James and R.D Zimmerman. Unfortunately the book doesn't analyse any novels by Rick R Reed, Marshall Thornton, Victor J Banis or David Lennon. Of course this might be down to publication dates but it would be good to have a new book which analyses many of the excellent gay and lesbian detective stories which have been written since 2004. I am hoping the latest version of The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film: A History and Annotated Bibliography will have a more detailed and comprehensive analysis. Many of the books written since 2004 provide incredibly rich characters who would make be excellent subjects for detailed academic analysis. It has to be said that Thornton's Nick Nowak, Lennon's Michel Doucette, Charlie Cochrane's Cambridge Fellows, Jeffrey Round's Dan Sharp and Julie Bozza's Albert Stern are all definitely worthy of in-depth academic analysis. There are just so many excellent authors writing about amazing characters! And it is excellent to have a resource which catalogues them. This book shows that there is more to this genre than just story telling. The characters often reflect the lives of the authors illustrating their own relationships, work and hopes. Sometimes authors write these stories because of a driving need to portray positive stories about lesbian and gay people. This does not mean that lesbian and gay characters are always cast as heroes. There are quite a few gay murderers within these stories. In some cases the authors allow the characters in their head free reign and just write without any particular objectives in mind. As a reader I cant tell the difference and the one thing that delights me is just the excellent quality of story telling across this genre. Stories also illustrate the social progress of gay rights, and key aspects of life such as work and profession, family life, sexuality, identity and community. The analysis here shows an incredible body of literature that gives voice to the reality of gay and lesbian lives. My only frustration with this book was the lack of an alphabetical list of all the books mentioned. We are given a series of lists broken down by themes but it would have been good to have a complete alphabetical list. This book is not cheap but it is at par with the price of other academic books. I bought it as a present for myself (any excuse) and I do think it was worth the investment. One of the things I realised after reading this is that there is a phenomenal body of lesbian mystery fiction out there. I think this book tends to slightly focus a bit more on lesbian detectives than it does gay, but it brought home to me that I haven't read any lesbian detective stories. This is now on my to do list!! Last year at the 2015 UK Fiction Meet I picked up a book by Lee Winter which has been nominated for a LAMDA award. So I am definitely looking forward to exploring lesbian mystery writing. In summary, this is an excellent resource for anyone who enjoys gay and lesbian detective fiction. I hope we will have other books which will analyse this genre in different ways. I now have a much larger to-read pile because I have ordered several books (gosh! what a surprise). I have discovered quite a few new authors, some of whom are only in print and I am excited about these new finds and look forward to exploring them. The only thing I need now is for someone to start an LGBT crime/detective fiction conference. When it happens I will be there!!

Review # 2 was written on 2015-01-14 00:00:00 Troy Chand On the plus side, Morgan's book was a pretty quick read, and there's plenty of information for someone who has a limited biographical sketch of the Beats. On the minus side, the writing is wooden (particularly noticeable in a book about dynamic writers), and Morgan never really makes a convincing argument for how the Beats changed America (or why they're particularly important, for that matter). Overall, it was a "meh" read for me.