A New Story about African-American Lesbians In an Unexpected Place:
Eric Jerome Dickey's Between Lovers
reviewed by Julie R. Enszer
I have been reading books by Eric Jerome Dickey for about two years now. I started with Milk in My Coffee, a delightful story about an African-American man in a relationship with a white woman. I devoured the rest of his books shortly after my introduction to him. Mr. Dickey's books are like candy, sweet and delicious. They are familiar and very real. Also, like candy, they are gone too quickly.
I consciously had saved his most recent book, Between Lovers, for the weekend. I like to have the ability to read his books from start to finish with as few interruptions as possible and at a leisurely pace. If I start reading one of his books on a Monday or during the week, I spend the week reading the book in a disjointed, even frantic, way. Reading one of his books during the week is like having a conversation with you best girlfriend about her new squeeze on a cell phone that keeps losing service. Not fun.
So, on Saturday morning I started the book. I knew it was about a love triangle. Mr. Dickey writes about intimate relationships between people with the candor that we deserve and baldly yet playfully portrays our most frightful and intimate moments. What I didn't know is that the love triangle was the story of one woman, Nicole, caught between the two people she loves, the narrator (a man) and Ayanna (a woman).
In fact, I read in disbelief for the first eighty pages or so convinced that there was going to be a twist that would take the focus off of the lesbian relationship and return Nicole to her man. My apologies to Mr. Dickey, but I assumed that he would not spend the entire book exploring a relationship between two women and the male narrator, but he did. I apologize for my assumptions about his heterosexual focus; I thank him for writing a book with the emotional complexity and narrative twists and turns that kept me reading, enthralled, all weekend.
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