Lifestyles is Jackie Calhoun's first book and, for those of you like me who have read her others, ironically it might be her best. There is much more character and plot development than you typically find in a Calhoun book. Her central figures are Kate and Pat. Kate arrives at the family lake home running from a failed marriage of 24 years. Somehow, without her noticing, her husband has fallen in love with a much younger woman. Kate doesn't know what else to do but get away. At the lake she meets Pat, who is in the midst of a crumbling relationship of her own. They start out as good friends who enjoy sailing, swimming and just talking about things. This book covers a time span of almost two years, so you get a real chance to see things develop. Kate is trying to define her relationships with a number of people - her grown children, her estranged brother who returns to her life just in time to discover he's dying of AIDS, the mortician who wants to marry her, her dead parents, but most of all Pat. You get a good, but little less clear picture of Pat who is also trying to figure out where she went wrong in her relationship with Gail, but more importantly is trying to understand the pull she is feeling towards Kate. It's a well developed story and gives some very real glimpses of what just plain every day life is like when everything seems to be falling apart around you. If you like Calhoun's work, you'll really like this one.

This was my first Jackie Calhoun book that I have read. I have absolutely fallen in love with her writing and she is now amoungst my favorite authors! This book was so real in the way that it is written and could be any one of our lives. It is so easy to relate to the characters and feel all of their emotions. She keeps you so engrossed that it makes it hard to put the book down. I am currently on my second Jackie Calhoun book and am enjoying it as much as the first. If you have never read any of Jackie Calhoun's work this would be a wonderful book to begin with. I recommend this book very highly and her as an author! Have fun reading!

This is a pretty typical Calhoun novel. Two women meet, face challenges and try to see if they can form a relationship out of that. Shelley inherits a lakeside resort from an uncle she hardly knew. Living by the lake, enjoying the natural beauty, immediately appeals to her, but not to her partner Jan, who wants to stay in the city. Shelley already deals with regrets over breaking up her marriage, which has caused her to be estranged from her only child. Can she be responsible for this relationship failing also or can she and Jan find a way to salvage what they have? At the lake they meet Emily, who stumbles up to their cabin after running her car into a tree. Emily has moved back home with mother after her lover cleans out their bank account and leaves. Can she just be friends with these women despite the attraction she feels for Shelley? And just to complicate matters, someone is terrifying Shelley by coming on to her land to destroy things. One of the different aspects of this novel is that the major characters are people in their 40s, not the energetic, nubile young women who usually populate lesbian novels. It's interesting to see mature women dealing with mature problems for a change.

This was Jackie Calhoun's second book and fits within the pattern she is known for. You have a central character, Amy, who has left her husband and children after twenty-four years of a rather mundane marriage to enter a lesbian relationship with a slightly younger woman, Deb. Amy's husband is confused, her children are angry, Deb isn't as faithful as she should be and Amy's business is failing while she tries to figure out how to make all of this work. There are a lot of secondary characters, gay and straight, who add to the plot and complicate it. There's plenty of conflict and humor and healthy dashes of romance. The question is, how will all of the questions be resolved at the end of the book? It's a pleasant read.

Alex is a good teacher. Her students tell her so and the sports teams she coaches respond to her leadership. Then the letter arrives. The letter is sent to every faculty member, the administration and the school board. The letter says that Alex is unfit to teach high school students because she is living with another woman and her child in an active lesbian relationship. If you're Alex, you think the worst has happened, but you're wrong. As you're trying to deal with the letter, your lover Sue is notified by her ex-husband that he is going to try and take her daughter away because of the relationship. Then the home of a friend is burned down and the boy Alex has been trying to help may be responsible. This book covers a lot of areas in a few pages. What are the costs of staying in the closet? Can teachers be deprived of their professions because of their lifestyles? Can Alex and Sue find a way to keep their relationship alive in the face of all of these pressures? And who keeps trying to burn out their friend? Surprisingly, the book carries a punch even with dealing with all of those topics.

I've never read a Jackie Calhoun book, so I decided to try this one to see how I'd like the author. The book starts off pretty well by bringing you into the frantic goings on of the bicycle accident. But from then on I felt like the book was more about how a broken neck gets mended than about the relationships between the women. I started getting bored with all the hospital details, but read on hoping for more personality details. But even to the end of the book I never got a good idea of what kind of personality each character had, not to mention there were too many characters. I really enjoy getting into characters' heads, to see what kind of person they are and how they react to different situations. This book seemed to consist of lots and lots of short scenes connected choppily together, which probably helped to give it a fragmented feel that is hard to feel close to or identify with. I was sorely dissappointed and am very unlikely to be buying any more Jackie Calhoun books.

I can not tell you how close to home this book has been to me, it was like reading my life. I have read this and all of her other books, can't wait for the next ones to come out after I have finished her books.

In this outing, Calhoun introduces several characters each carrying their own brand of baggage. The book's central character is Danny, newly divorced and newly attracted to women. Her life is complicated by Maureen, Chris, and her best friend since grade school, Kara. The ebb and flow of Danny's relationships with these women is the plot of the book.

Calhoun doesn't skimp on the secondary characters either. There's the gay couple who ostensibly open a bed & breakfast but it caters primarily to AIDS patients and there is the Wisconsin scenery.

Calhoun is a very good writer who has the talent to be an even better writer if she would stretch to write more complicated plots. Granted, I've only read three of her books, but the characters, while well-drawn in each book, are interchangeable. For instance, Danny could be the central character in any of Calhoun's books - in other words, the names change, but the story remains the same. Her publisher should do Calhoun and her readers a favor and let Calhoun stretch her talents.

As someone who has read all of Jackie Calhoun's books, I would have to rate this as better than most of them. The story is more detailed and develops over a period of months. This allows the characters to present themselves more fully and the outcome of the book isn't obvious from the beginning. At one point you will wonder how exactly is Danny going to figure out her situation with Maureen, Kara and Chris. And how long can she keep her numerous "evenings out" and what's really going on during them secret from her mother and daughter. It's a pleasant short read, full of sexy passages, and not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

This romance features a large cast of characters including Jenny, recovering from the death of her lover, Rita, recovering from the death of her parents, and Pam, recovering from leaving her lover. Two of these women get together but only after the other seduces one of them.

Sorting the characters out is, initially, difficult. I couldn't figure out why until I realized that they are, essentially, interchangeable. Beyond that, there isn't much of a story line.

Despite the book's shortcomings, I enjoyed the author's writing, and wish she'd try a more difficult plot in one of her future books. I'll try her other books in case this was just a fluke, but I hope she tries to challenge herself. Her locale descriptions are wonderfully drawn - so much so that you'll be hunting for a sweater as fall turns into winter in the book even if you're sitting in 100 degree weather.

This was my first JC book. It was light and easy reading. The intimate moments between her characters were sketchy and left plenty to ones imagination. Not a get "hot and bothered" kind of read but enjoyable just the same.

In this outing, Calhoun introduces Joan McKenzie, living alone, holding down two jobs and attracted to her life-long best friend, Diane. While on the surface she acknowledges that a relationship with Diane is impossible, she can't seem to establish a committed relationship with another woman.

Calhoun is a talented writer with finely drawn characters. Unfortunately, you only need to read one or two books by Calhoun to know what the plots of all her books will be. In each book, there is the main character who is attracted to her best friend who is not interested so the main character turns to other women for physicality and a gay man for a secondary friendship.

Calhoun needs to stretch her talents to be the best she can be. If she does, that's when we'll have some very, very good lesbian novels come out of the mainstream lesbian publishers.

Calhoun is a good writer and because I grew up in Wisconsin I enjoy reading about lesbians in settings I grew up in. I ordered Birds of a Feather after enjoying the novel By Reservation Only. That book had a happy ending. Birds does not. It leaves its women unable to form relationships for realistic and common reasons. But as someone who is like these women, myself, I look to the fictional world for successful everlasting bonding. So instead of escape, I got a book to identify with and think about.

A starter book for readers and writers of lesbian fiction.

Hard to really get close to the characters - I finished it mainly for my own sense of closure. Viable situation, but the book needed more character development. Seemed like a story sketched out pretty well but not worked fully. The antagonist was not "large enough," and the steps taken to counter the antagonist were naive.

I will probably read more Jackie Calhoun, but more from her reputation than this particular book.

This is definitely NOT one of Jackie Calhoun's best books. Calhoun creates one of the great mistakes in literature, you don't care about the characters at the end of the book. Carly, who discovered her lebianism late in life, comes home to find her younger lover in bed with another woman. She runs off to live in the family home at Tamarak Creek with her gay brother and meets the new neighbors, Serena, also a lesbian, and her abusive husband Jess. Carly and Serena start an affair, threatened and made violent by Jess. Reads like pretty powerful stuff. The problem is that you can't develop any connection to the characters and there's no passion except when Jess is nearly killing one or both of the women. It took me three days to plod through 204 pages. For a contrast, read Love's Melody Lost by Radcliffe. Ironically, it's only 187 pages, but, by the end of it, you really care about what is going to happen to the central characters. Jackie Calhoun, who can be an excellent writer, should read that book to get herself back on track.