 Echo
Magazine's Ken Furtado
reviewsThe Blind Season. Reprinted here with permission... |
 Reviewed by
EchoMag.com June 6th Issue, 2003The Blind Season by Ronald L. Donaghe Writers Club Press, $19.95, trade pap. The Blind Season is the second book of Common Threads in the Life , a quartet of novels whose action encompasses more than 30 years, ending in the present, and which depicts lives of rural gay men and lesbians as they might have been lived, and issues they may have faced. Tom Allen and Joel Reece are a couple from the tiny New Mexico town of Common, a few miles from Deming. The first part of their story is told in book 1, Common Sons . Now in their early twenties, Tom and Joel have met Sharon, a young woman from a Mennonite community in Mexico, who has been shunned for being seen dancing naked, and must beg for food from tourists. Tom and Joel are looking for a surrogate mother to bear their child, and when Sharon offers to conceive a child with them, the two men sleep with her, then smuggle her back to Common. The sub-plots of the novel cover a lot of territory, including the relationship Tom and Joel each has with his family; a self-hating closeted cop with a sadistic streak; a right-wing religious organization that bodes ill for the scandalous parents; the old lesbian who runs one of Common's most popular cafes, and who becomes a staunch ally of the threesome; and the ultimate question of what kind of family Tom, Joel and Sharon will forge once she delivers her baby. Donaghe's writing makes for fluid and effortless reading. His protagonists are immensely likeable, and it is easy to see why they have acquired a following of fond readers. The "bad guys" tend to be drawn in broader strokes, however, as if intended to elicit boos and hisses; they could use some fleshing out. The threats they pose are too easily circumvented, so that this reader never quite believed that Tom, Joel, Sharon or any of their friends or allies were ever in real trouble. The greatest appeal of The Blind Season lies in its broad exploration of the meaning of family, and the differences, whether good or bad, a family — or lack thereof — can have on one's life. That includes not only the lovers, Joel and Tom, but their blood relations, extended family, adoptive family, religious family, and even the kind of family of neighbors that exists in small rural communities. |
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