Word: novels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIED. BARBARA RASKIN, 63, author of the best-selling novel Hot Flashes (1987), a paean to female friendship; of complications after surgery; in Baltimore...
...Sohn, sex columnist and author of the novel Run Catch Kiss, suggests TV's new sexplorations offer a safe outlet: "Sex is scary for a lot of people. These things don't require that we leave the house." And perhaps the audience, surfeited with sexual fairy tales, is ready for reality. How else to explain Darren Star, father of the giddily ludicrous Melrose Place, creating a show that's a tour de force of sexual honesty...
Clarke, who administers the Editorial Diversity Program at Time Inc., has written a novel that is all about change, but gradual change: the kind that transforms people's lives while they're preoccupied with the daily chores. This story of Johnnie Mae's eventual triumph--and of a city's grudging coming to terms with the hopes and dreams she typifies--flows quietly but carves deep channels in the reader's mind...
...river that runs through Breena Clarke's accomplished first novel, River, Cross My Heart (Little, Brown; 245 pages; $23), is the sluggish brown Potomac, benevolent on the surface but treacherous beneath. Along with other young African Americans from their Georgetown neighborhood, Johnnie Mae Bynum and her sister Clara are forced to use the river as a swimming hole owing to a race ban at their local pool. It's the 1920s, and the girls are part of a steady migration from the fields of the rural South to the streets of bustling Washington. Things are supposed to be better there...
...might hope, or at least think, that a novel with this title, about a single, thirtyish woman in New York City, would contain at least one significant likable character, preferably the husband-hunting protagonist herself. But in setting out to satirize some of the more glaring materialism of our time, Janowitz has created an oddly '80s portrait of life in the big city without any of the humor or flashes of insight that might have made this book stand out. A hateful heroine and a catalog of her conspicuous consuming do not an amusing read make...