This book is outstanding. The characters come to life immediately, and you get more and more attached to them as they mature. You get the opportunity to follow the main character all through her life. I recommend this book to anyone who likes a good read. It takes place in the 20th century...a memorable time for us all. Thank you Dorothy E. Lee!

This is a must read book. You feel you are there in that time. The detail, the "must keep reading" aspect, is all there. The characters are important in what they have to say and you keep wanting to know more about them. Ms. Lee has "painted" a realistic and enjoyable portrait. It's a gift! Thank you!

The beginning of this book is actually the end -- so for people like me who need to read the end of the book before I get there -- it was a perfect novel! The book revolves around Eleanor. Her life holds many of the same challenges, joys, despairs, and celebrations we all encounter. Yet while reading this one realizes that each of us is extraordinary and the sum of many events, encounters and experiences. I laughed with El, cried with her, shared her life and felt it represented a real life experience. Ms. Lee does a remarkable job of telling a life story that everyone can identify with and feel a part of. A great read!

Let me start by saying that this book is not what is described above in the story details. Amazon has crossed this with another book. This is Daniel and Mercy's story and the final book in the Wabash trilogy.

Daniel and Mercy have been inseparable for most of their life since being adopted by Liberty and Farr. Actually they were rescued/saved by Liberty/Farr. They have grown up as brother and sister through all of their life. They aren't as close in the past years as they are both starting their adult lives. But when suddenly strangers appear in town and insist that Mercy is actually their sister Hester things change quickly. Percy is back a a villain in this story and he is now in the slave trade, actually he is running a slave "breeding factory" and is evil as ever. He still hates anyone or anything attached to the Quills.

One of the biggest turmoil's in this story is that Mercy's brothers who basically have no manners to speak of want her to go back to Kentucky with the to see her dying mother. This makes her wonder who she really is..... Along the way she and Daniel realize that they both love each other but are afraid to tell the other. On goes the struggle.

A good romance story!

Dorothy's Garlock's Wabash trilogy is the best of the best. You'll fall in love with these characters. I feel like they are dear friends. I've read this book and the other two books of the trilogy over 20 times. Daniel and Mercy, Raine and Amy, Libery and Farr, it was wonderful to see what happened to my beloved characters.

Another excellent Garlock book. Ms. Garlock is a master of including people from other stories and interweaving them through the lives she writes about, and this one was definitely no exception. Mercy and Daniel are charming characters, with many of the traits of Liberty and Farr - the couple that raised them, and were featured in a previous book of this trilogy. I was not ready for this story to end, and would also have liked to read about Farr and George, and Amy and Rain coming home. However, Ms. Garlock made it very clear they were in route. Nevertheless, I would have enjoyed the homecoming.

Mercy is not quite as strong as Liberty or Amy, from the previous books in this trilogy. She did seem pretty dependent on Daniel, however, she was going through quite a lot, and that seemed only natural. She held herself together very well, with her chin high and the same quick temper of Liberty Quill.

Their love story was so sweet and warm, and very enjoyable to read. With the involvement of the family rival, Hammond Perry, still bent on revenge after all these years... the story keeps moving at a fast pace. I found it hard to put down, like the others in this trilogy.

An opportunity to get thinking about a few "difficult" subjects, while enjoying a few refreshing lines of thought as well as a no-nonense yet witty style.Being a woman, gay or poor not a requisite, although it might help. If you're neither of the three, buy the book anyway, you might learn something (I did).

Not since Andrea Dworkin's "Woman Hating" (that I read in 1978) have I been so moved by the truth of another writer that I would want to emulate it. In sharing Harris's vision of writing as an "uncompromising revolutionary act" the point is made that the mainstream literary world as well as the "so-called avant-garde and burgeoning feminist critical aristocracy" will not appreciate the lesbian writer who "refuses to obey the rules." To both women, nothing is more important than telling the truth, "refusing all categories, all who would shape your writing to their own use."

"Yes!" I cried, " The End.

Book Review The Forgotten Masterwork: Dorothy Allison's Skin in light of Two of Three Things I Know for Sure

Tamara M. Powell

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. Dorothy Allison. New York: Dutton Books, 1995. 94 pp.

Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature. Dorothy Allison. Ithaca: Firebrand, 1994. 261 pp.

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure has been widely hailed as the newest offering from recent Showtime special Bastard Out of Carolina author Dorothy Allison. The slim novel can be seen as a coming together of the anger Allison poured into Bastard and Trash and the growth she has experienced as she has matured and become a parent herself. Trash reveals the struggles behind her decision to live, while Two or Three Things elucidates the wisdom she has gained along the way. However, between Trash and Two or Three Things, Allison created another work, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature. And while Two or Three Things has gained much attention, Skin has been all but ignored. But it is Skin that reveals the growth and thought that took place between Trash and Two or Three Things, and instead of looking inward, as Allison's other works do, Skin looks outward, allowing Allison to analyze, contemplate, and theorize upon how she sees the world. Allison is known as a writer who tells her stories over and over. She is conscious of this--and opens Two or Three Things with the line "Let me tell you a story" (1). "Two or three things I know for sure" she closes the first chapter, "and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make" (3). Allison makes version after version of many events of her life, from scaring her sisters with her stories, to being raped by her stepfather, to receiving glasses from the Lions Club, one of Allison's many talents is that she can make the reader listen to the same story over and over, awestruck, mesmerized. Allison creates herself and re-creates herself in all her works. "Behind the story I tell is the one I don't" she writes, "Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear" (Two or Three 39); "The story I do not tell is the only one that is a lie" (71). But before these stories, before these pictures in Two or Three, there was Skin. Often ignored, it is Skin that pierces below the stories and drawl to stress the importance of addressing the emotions in writing. If Bastard, Trash, and Two or Three are Allison in practice, then Skin is Allison in theory. And it's no ordinary theory. In Skin Allison stresses the importance of addressing emotions in writing. Her quest to divulge her own fear, confusion, shame, lust and love spans twenty-three loosely related essays which discuss what prompted her to read, what prompted her to write, and what her writing is and means to her. However, this is not just a work on understanding Dorothy Allison; she includes large amounts of herstory, both social and political. Like many other of her works, Skin describes how active Allison was in the lesbian feminist movements of the 60, 70s and 80s. Also like many of her other works, it describes her journey from her childhood in a backwater South Carolina shack to her home in the suburbs of New York, through poverty, child abuse, finding herself as a lesbian and joining the feminist and lesbian communities around her. Like her other works, Skin is a description of a very determined woman's life. And her candor draws the reader in, giving the reader points of reference and view so clearly that the reader can position himself or herself in relation to Allison. Unlike in Two or Three, where the reader must take Allison's perspective for herself in order to take the story in, Skin makes it possible for the reader to almost debate with Allison on issues. In a sense, this ignored novel might tell more about Allison, make her more human, than all of her other works combined. All twenty-three of these easily accessible--if you don't mind a lot of graphic sex--essays foster critical thinking on a very deep level.

I read this when it was first published and it has been a major influence in the way I look at the universe ever since. Dorothy's story of her unfolding awareness is wonderful. The "Kingdom of the Gods" book by Hodson and the Perelandra Garden books are also good and along similar lines, but this one is my favorite.

This is a very personal story about Dorothy's ordinary-turned-extraordinary life, as she expanded her consciousness in simple ways that anyone can do themselves, privately, not attempting to attract attention but seeking for her own personal fulfillment. The book is a real page-turner as it moves into Dorothy MacLean's spiritual adventures while she and the Caddys created the impossible-by-all-scientific-accounts garden at Findhorn, Scotland. It got to the point where I just couldn't put it down but did-- just so it wouldn't end! The messages she wrote down from the devas (her word for celestial beings that hold the blueprints for all of matter) are direct, simple and comforting -- but also haunting in their admonitions to mankind to work on an intuitive level with nature and have the courage to reduce the consumption and accompanying waste of our natural resources, which, as they very clearly communicated, creates a divide between man and the spiritual forces of the planet. As Albert Einstein said: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."

Toward that end, I have found this book to be profoundly inspiring as I go about my not-very-extraordinary daily life, and I find myself thinking of Dorothy and the Caddys often as I seek the best possible solutions for my own daily problems. It has definitely expanded my own relationship with the world and my own infinitely smaller (but no less important) role on the planet.

Dorothy's first encounter with spirituality was her introduction, through her husband John, to the Sufi teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan. Her friend Sheena Govan then schooled her in the Western Tradition, emphasizing love (I Corinthians 13) and the bringing of love into every action.

One day in her kitchen Dorothy suddenly realized that God was within her, an experience that could be called her "First Initiation." Dorothy began writing down inspired, intuitive thoughts as they occurred to her. Sheena Govan encouraged her to make this her regular practice.

But Sheena also encouraged Dorothy to find ways to express her God-centeredness in the mundane world. This meant, for example, leaving a comfortable job in order to become, literally, a servant. It also meant going through periods of despair when Dorothy lost everything she had previously valued-including her connection to God.

When Peter and Eileen Caddy secured the management of a large hotel in northern Scotland, Dorothy felt drawn to go with them. They ran even the smallest details of the hotel in accord with Eileen's inner guidance. Their practice was to do everything in the outer world with care, attention, and love. Their inner work included connecting with the worldwide Network of Light, connections made in the spirit of love. Dorothy also developed a refined sensitivity and learned to distinguish between the felt sense of various spiritual energies.

Apart from the autobiographical sections, much of the book consists of Dorothy's writings produced by attuning to these different energies, and her reflections on the material received.

I found Who is Sylvia a great read: absorbing and provocative. You don't have to be a shrink to enjoy it and profit from it.

A refreshing approach to therapy. Particularly D. Peven's direct and sometimes humorous approach to mending the psyche. No punches pulled, no magic wands, just attentive understanding and creative methods all wrapped inside the continuous and uncontrollable ebb & flow of life.

interesting personal and down to earth. Book reveals insights into everyone's hidden side. Gives everyone something to identify with without feeling guilty about our own craziness.

When the heroine attempts to be another person, she works hard to live a life that many of us would enjoy. However, as often happens with even the best plans, things often occur that get our very likable heroine in trouble. Her pretended identity was not planned, but when the ship she is traveling on as a maid sinks, she is thought to be the daughter of a well-to-do family. She is the maid, and then she has to fight to keep her true identity a secret as she builds a life that truly has love and worth as its foundation. Its ending is excellent. I enjoyed every minute of the story, even though there were times I found myself very nervous for her well-being. Ms. Eden really makes us care for the characters she so skillfully creates.

THE LUSITANIA PLAYS IMPORTANT HAND IN THE FATES OF A MISTRESS AND HER LOOK ALIKE MAID. THE MEMORY OF THE SINKING PROPELS THE STORY ALONG TO THE VERY END.

a girl and her maid embark on the last voyage of the Lusitania. There lies the opportunity for the maid, harriet to change her life for the better. If you are a fan of ship disasters, such as the Titanic or the Lusitania, this is a book you will read from start to finish.

This is the book that made me a feminist. It boils down the issue into a simple, non-polemic subject. Are women human? If God gives you the gift to be a good mechanic, then, if you are a woman and women are human, a mechanic is what you must be.

It is a pity that Dorothy Sayers is known best for her mystery writing, in a way. She tired of Peter Wimsey (like Conan-Doyle tired of Holmes) before she stopped writing him, and I think she wanted to be remembered instead for her scholarly and theological works. Like C.S. Lewis, she cuts to the very heart of the issues she addresses, and she finds a way to neither over-simplify nor over-complicate. I agree with the other reviewer -- this book should be required reading for high school students, and many adults could benefit as well.

Your first association with the name Dorothy Sayers will be, naturally, as the creator of the urbane, noble sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey. If you've read the Peter Wimsey novels in order, you may have noticed that Sayers invested more and more humanity and depth in him as the series progressed.

Since she revealed so much depth as a mystery novelist, I decided to try her out as an essayist. "Are Women Human?" is a slight pamphlet with an introduction and two essays which can be read in one sitting. As you finish the last page you will find yourself wondering why so little has changed in the last sixty years!

Sayers applied intelligence and humor (excuse me, humour) to her seemingly rhetorical question "Are Women Human?". Her answer, like most wise answers, is simple. Beyond the obvious "of course", Sayers posits that "male" and "female" are only adjectives modifying the noun human. Therefore, humanity is the common denominator, and each human should be judged on the person's individual merits -- creative, lethargic, witty or plodding. Whatever the case may be.

This is a book that should be required reading for every high school student -- young people who are in the process of sorting out all kinds of identity issues. It may not be too late for most adults to benefit from this little gem, either!