OTHER GIRLS

In Ayres's debut novel, gorgeous Elizabeth Breedlove, a first-year student in the class of 1978 at Willard College for Women, is a tough girl with a soft center. Upperclasswoman Pip Collier, fresh from an affair with her African-American feminist professor and hot and heavy with her androgynous roommate, Dusie Hertz—who is Elizabeth's official "Big Sister"—becomes fascinated by Elizabeth, much to Dusie's dismay. Elizabeth, a reformed "man-eater," responds in kind, and their love begins with a "bodice-ripping ban-the-book kind of lesbian lust." Painting a picture of the women's college as a breeding ground for lesbian sex and failing to chronicle the emotional challenges Elizabeth might experience in her journey toward self-discovery, the author becomes sidetracked by stereotypes and clichés: there's the predatory professor, the Marine who rapes a lesbian to teach her a lesson, the lesbian who becomes a model to shack up with other lesbian models, the steamy backrooms in gay clubs, etc. In page after page of the Sturm und Drang involved in female friendships and love affairs, Ayres puts her spunky, searching characters through so many relationship configurations and emotional roller coasters that the happily-ever-after ending is an anticlimax. The two female characters with the greatest chance of finding genuine happiness with each other part company and marry men, and Ayres has her characters jumping through too many unnecessary hoops to find true love. (May)