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Book Reviewed by:A raw and unforgettable portrait of sex, friendship, and the perilous edge of liberation for two young women—set against the neon-lit porn world of 1980s Los Angeles.
Los Angeles, 1982. Jude is eighteen, newly out of reform school and hungry for more than her small-town past can offer. Searching for her best friend, Winnie, she instead falls under the spell of Laird, an older man with a motorcycle, a needle, and a taste for danger. What begins as escape soon unravels into motel rooms, stickups, and drug binges.
Then Jude finds Winnie, reinvented as Velvet at a Sunset Strip club. Together, the two girls imagine a future: bartending, dancing, writing the novels they dream of, building a home of their own. But the same world that promises glamour and freedom is poised to consume them, and survival demands that they navigate the men who offer love, power, and escape—always at a cost.
With Joan Didion's eye for California's allure and shadows, and told in a two-part structure reminiscent of Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, Lovers XXX is a hypnotic novel of friendship and self-invention, of sexual identity beyond binaries, and of the costs of giving one's body to the performance of sex. Above all, it is a love story like no other—between two ardent, vulnerable, and revelatory women.
The novel's first half is told from Jude's point of view and ends with the threat of violence—the narrative then abruptly shifts perspective and time frame, switching to Winnie's perspective and fast-forwarding several decades, as Winnie, who has achieved some of her youthful ambitions, sets out to find Jude, who has been missing and presumed dead by most in the porn industry since shortly after the events narrated in the first half. This technique effectively alters readers' perceptions of both Jude and Winnie, first, by showing readers Jude through the eyes of her friend, and second, by adding considerable depth to Winnie, a character who, in Jude's half of the book, often comes off as a somewhat passive background character when compared with Jude's main-character energy and her pursuit of stardom. Questions that were once unanswered become less so, and it's a testament to Rowbottom's skill that, even though some of the events in the two halves of the novel overlap, they maintain interest and intrigue, remaining fresh and surprising...continued
Full Review
(695 words)
(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Coco Mellors, author of Blue Sisters
Lovers XXX tackles the sticky subjects of female sexuality, objectification and desire with a smoothness that appears effortless. Allie Rowbottom's writing has a rare combination of deep compassion, prescient insight, and just plain coolness that I'm in awe of. Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs
You're thrown right into Lovers XXX and it doesn't stop. Allie writes about desire, survival, intimacy, and exploitation with a kind of feral tenderness. She turns stick-ups, strip clubs, and motel rooms into a fever dream that makes ruin look romantic. Impossible to put down!.jpg "Theater in Amsterdam showing the movie Deep Throat, 1977")
Allie Rowbottom's novel Lovers XXX is set in early 1980s Los Angeles against the backdrop of the adult film industry, during the waning days of what has since been called the "golden age" of adult cinema. For a brief time, from the early 1970s through the early 1980s, hardcore porn films achieved a kind of cachet, earning splashy red-carpet premieres, distribution to general movie theaters, bona fide celebrity actors, awards ceremonies, and coverage by mainstream film critics.
Many sources trace this era, dubbed "porno chic" in a 1973 New York Times article, to the 1969 release of Blue Movie, directed by Andy Warhol, which was the first theatrically released motion picture to depict actual sexual intercourse. The success and ...
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