cover image Sister Safety Pin

Sister Safety Pin

Lorrie Sprecher. Firebrand Books, $9.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-1-56341-050-5

Take a wry, reflective 17-year-old, add the Sex Pistols, Sisterhood Is Powerful and a generous handful of safety pins, and you'll have Sprecher's delightful portrait of the artist as a young, punk lesbian. Even before Melany's term paper is flunked (somehow ``Eve: Lesbian-Feminist Extraordinaire'' just doesn't cut it with her Milton professor), she's got problems. Having escaped from her family to a large, anonymous university, she finds herself at loose ends. In punk rock, she discovers music that mirrors her state of mind: ``It sounded as discordant as I felt''; and at a local punk club, she meets Iso, a ``real lesbian''-more precisely, she falls on top of her while drunkenly pogoing on a table. Melany soon discovers that punk and lesbian-feminism don't mix easily, and that Iso has her own agenda. As Melany travels through school, relationships and her maturing sense of self and purpose, Sprecher's first novel evokes the political and artistic climate of the times through both the lyrics of established bands and those written by Iso's sister, Janie. In Melany's ultimate integration of her seemingly disparate concerns, Sprecher convincingly demonstrates that punk and feminism indeed share some essential methods and goals. Melany's search for personal and political meaning and her growing sense of agency and responsibility offer a welcome contrast to the all-too-common destructive, nihilistic protagonists of many contemporary writers. (Dec.)