Back at Reuben's San Fransiscan apartment, the two decide to partner up, just for a scam or two, until they can recoup their lost winnings. They develop a certain friendly-but-somewhat-suspicious camraderie, and, finding that they work rather well together, decide to see what they can get out of the figurine.

Grace and Reuben are wonderful characters - quite a refreshing change from the typical romance genre. Both are somewhat jaded and devious, yet the reader sees glimpses of basic goodness and kindness - even innocence - that only desperate circumstances and hard luck has served to temper in both of them.

The book drew me in immediately - action-packed from the get-go. The dialogue was quite clever, with lots of quite funny moments, as well as a couple of intricately impressive con schemes (where DOES Ms. Gaffney come up with this stuff?) Reuben and Grace are endearing, and I think any reader would soon find themself cheering for this couple.

Grace and Reuben develop a certain honor-among-thieves trust and friendship, and even grow to depend on one another (though they'd never admit it), and though there is a mutual attraction, they each inwardly determine to keep things neutral...until they find themselves caught up in the dangerous world of a deadly chinese mafia in Chinatown, the leader of which wants the little figurine quite desparately...and wants Grace even more.

Though the story is lively and witty, a deep, abiding love is developing between Grace and Reuben that is really quite touching and very deeply sexy. Reuben, though a shaking coward where knives are involved, a devious con-man when the moment calls for one, and a comic with an appreciation for the absurd, is probably the sexiest hero I've ever "met" in the pages of a book!

I highly recommend this book for anyone with the need to work through forgiveness. It is written in a disarmingly simple, lightly humorous style, but the concepts it expouses are very powerful. Claiming that any hurt is like a "mini-death", the authors use Kubler-Ross's five stages of bereavement - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance - as a framework to work through the forgiving process.

At the same time, the concept of the two components of nonviolence, resisting evil but at the same time wooing the evildoer, is introduced as a creative way to foster reconciliation.

The book is religious in nature, but by no means oppressively so. It will be beneficial to persons of any or no religious persuasion. A delightful book.

It is a shame that for so many years the book was rejected by young Asian Americans as being "too white face" or "Uncle Tom" as it is not so at all. C.Y. Lee was a Chinese immigrant and wrote of the society as he saw it at that time, which is not the way the younger generation, who did not live through the immigrant experience, want to see it. This is not unusual, many well schooled, well fed sucessful Americans do not want to know that their grandparents arrived in steerage with their belongings tied up in kit bag, unable to speak the language, and worked 18 hours a day in menial jobs so that their children could get ahead.

This is a poignant story of Chinese immigrant families in Southern California during the days of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the difficulty the young American-raised men had in finding a wife. They were not allowed to bring women in from China, and they were not permitted to marry non Asians. Because of the Communist takeover, many Chinese who had dreamed of returning home to China when they retired after working all their lives were unable to do so. The situtation created an artifically stressed society. The book has tragedy and sadness, as well as hope and joy.

My only criticism of the novel, and a mild one at that, is that it frequently reads like a play script, especially in the last chapter, where there is a lot of dialogue, followed by descriptions of the action which read like stage directions. It is possible that the novel was orignally intended to be a play.

Warning, possible spoiler:

The musical version of the book which was also filmed was very loosely based on the novel, in fact one of the major characters was created for the musical. Apparently this has been done again with the new version playing on Broadway. Readers expecting to find a printed version of the musical may be disappointed.

Carol Queen, whose short story submissions to "Herotica" and "The Best American Erotica" have been many of my favorite erotica stories ever, proves that she can work her same magic in novel (or novella) form.

I think that her sucess with this book is based in that the protangist (Miranda / Randy) and her fellow adventurers stay pretty much to the point of the book: sex. When they're not having it, they're talking about their sexual histories or waxing philisophical on their favorite intimate activities. But here's the fun part: they're not shallow. These characters care about each other and build fascinatingly sturdy, loyal relationships. We're not specifically told the passage of time between some chapters, but as the characters get more familar with each other, it's fairly obvious that chosen families are being built.

I don't recall any wasted words, or anything jarring in this book. The sex is often rough, but there's nothing unconsensual going on. It is the stuff of fantasy, but as such Queen has managed to make each fantasy important and relevant to the overall tale of gender-play, love, sex, rites of passage and the realm of the forbidden.

I am sorry to see that, as of this writing, this book is so hard to find. Queen is a wonderful writer, and "The Leather Daddy and the Femme" beats the heck out of most of what I've seen out there.