Callaloo: & Other Lesbian Love Tales

The 16 short fictions in this debut collection probe and celebrate aspects of lesbian desire, mostly among women of color. The stories are unremittingly earnest, the author plainly speaking her desire to portray women delighting in each other and struggling to overcome prejudice, though she is also careful to depict lesbians experiencing grief and loss. In ""Miss Hannah's Lesson,"" an 18-year-old slave falls in love and has an erotic awaking with the kind mistress who teaches her to read. Unfortunately, Barnett mixes stilted, formal language approximating 19th-century speech with modern-day anachronisms, and the dialogue is clunky and far from credible. ""Bitter Wine"" portrays the decades-delayed consummation of another girlhood crush. The longest piece, ""Meatloaf,"" follows a protagonist who mourns her troubled lover, while ""Losing Sight of Lavender"" presents itself as the journal of a Princeton graduate coping with HIV. Barnett clearly wishes to move and console her readers, and to do so with a minimum of artifice. But her prose is often wincingly awkward and without grace, overpowered by clich s and solecisms. Many plots here are promising, yet Barnett undermines their potential with narration and dialogue garnered from outworn, simplified truisms of identity politics. There is little room for nuance or subtle characterization in these stories, but there is plenty of yearning, healing and romance: ""the woman that believes is out there and as I work on healing I'm waiting for her."" Regrettably, readers hoping for a fresh new voice in lesbian short fiction are still waiting as well. (Nov.)