Fascination and Other Bar Stories

Janet Money is Sports Editor of the Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review.

Fascination is a collection of linked short stories about Montreal’s
lesbian bar scene. Some characters, as well as three bars, recur. Among
these characters are Oats, a woman who lives a serially monogamous
lifestyle at a dizzying pace, and Joe, a basketball-playing “baby
dyke.”

Manthorne deals deftly with several aspects of lesbian life, including
leather and S & M sex, power and control, being left for a man,
children, sex toys, even good old-fashioned love. But the stories,
perhaps reflecting the bar life they describe, have a fleeting, shallow
nature. We want to get to know these women better, but that’s hard to
do in a bar, or a bar story. Perhaps that’s the point.

Numerous typographical errors are an annoying distraction from an
otherwise interesting collection.