She’s My Dad by Iolanthe Woulff

Title: She’s My Dad
Author: Iolanthe Woulff
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Length: Novel / 469 pages
Buy the book: Publisher, Amazon

Blurb:

“Don’t hate, Nicholas. Hate destroys everything. Don’t let it destroy you…”

For decades, ultra-liberal Windfield College has been a thorn in the side of Northern Virginia’s hidebound elite. When a teaching position unexpectedly becomes available, the school hires a former male graduate – now a transsexual woman named Nickie Farrell – as an assistant professor of English. Hoping to find peace, Nickie keeps her secret under wraps until ambitious lesbian student reporter Cinda Vanderhart outs her. And Cinda has noticed something else: both Nickie and a young townie waiter named Collie Skinner have a genetic quirk which causes their eyes to be different colors. Convinced that the similarity is no coincidence, Cinda begins an investigation to discover the connection between them.

Meanwhile, in a death-bed confession as she succumbs to years of brutality at the hands of her disgraced cop husband, Collie’s mother Luanne reveals that his birth resulted from an illicit affair she had with a long-vanished Windfield college senior named Nick Farrington. Shattered by his mother’s death, Collie turns for comfort to Robin Thompson, a gentle-hearted Christian co-worker at the upper-crust Foxton Arms restaurant. As Nickie is stalked by a pair of homicidal sociopaths, Robin finds herself entangled not only in Cinda’s investigative machinations but also a murderous plot by former U.S Ambassador and tycoon Eamon Douglass to eradicate the hated college with a suicide detonation of a Cesium 137 dirty bomb. Lives and secrets hang in the balance until everything comes to a head on the morning of Windfield’s annual spring picnic: April Fools Day.

Filled with richly-drawn characters and building to a stunning climax, SHE’S MY DAD is a story about the destructiveness of hate, the power of love, and the redemptive triumph of good over evil.

Like her title character Nickie Farrell, Iolanthe Woulff is a transsexual woman. A sixty-year-old Princeton-educated English major, she lives in Palm Springs, CA, where for several years she wrote a column in a local magazine about the challenges of gender transition. As the eldest child of author Herman Wouk, storytelling has always been dear to Ms. Woulff’s heart. Her hope is that besides providing a suspenseful read, SHE’S MY DAD will help to dispel some of the widespread misconceptions about transsexual people.

Review:

The young man smiled, and Luanne again experienced the delicious disorientation which had initially captivated he. Nick had two different-colored eyes, his left iris was a warm brown color, and the right was a gorgeous topaz blue. The discrepancy was caused by a genetic anomaly, he’d explained, and showed up more often in white cats than humans.

Behold! Possibly the only time that trope has ever worked for me in fiction. Now, I know what you’re thinking, that not only is there a semi-colon missing from one of those sentences but more importantly, what the hell kind of color is “topaz blue”?

Well, I’ll tell you*: only the color of awesome, baby. Only the color of awesome.

This book, she is complicated. Let’s take it from the top:

Deep in the heart of Northern Virginia, a good ole boy disowned his gay son but then died in a plane crash before the papers were signed, thus accidentally giving the son pots and pots of money which said son used to found Windfield College, a bastion of tolerance, which we understand as “mad amounts of LGBT people”. Meanwhile, Luanne Skinner has an affair with Nick, the boy with the two different-colored eyes, then never sees him again, despite bearing him a son with — yup, two different-colored eyes.

Luanne also has the misfortune of having married a brutal ogre of a man, who beats her and her strange-eyed son, Collie. Luanne’s twins also come to separate bad ends — her son hooks up with a neo-Nazi who spouts Nietzche as justification for homophobia — while the two men are in bed together — and what does all of this have to do with Nickie Farrell, a stunning English professor who materializes out of the ether one day and starts teaching at Windfield, just as the dying, hate-filled magnate Eamon Douglass decides to blow up the college?

Oh y’all. So, confession time: I’ve had this book for awhile. I’ve had this book so long, in fact, that there was a gentle *cough cough poke* email sent by the maintainers of this fine website as to, you know, where is this review?

And I had to cheerfully explain to them that I loved this book so much that for quite some time, my entire review consisted of a series of shrill, high-pitched squeaking noises, and I could probably record them an .mp3, but since most of our readers aren’t dolphins, I’d do my best to put some coherent words together about just how much I adored this book.

I’m still trying. Somebody let me know if I succeed.

The thing is, I feel like I’ve been waiting for this book my whole life. It’s smooth and well-written and laugh-out-loud funny and most importantly, it unpacks a whole bunch of transgender/transsexuality baggage and under the guise of telling a really complex, tense, fascinating story, manages to educate and instruct and break your heart a little.

First of all, I love Nickie Farrell. She’s wonderfully strong and brave and insecure and a little neurotic and crazy and out of her depth. She tries her best and she screws up sometimes, and then she tries a little more and makes some more mistakes and falls in love and picks out shoes and goes to concerts and is betrayed and, you know, is a regular damn heroine.

That’s one of the things I loved best about this book: it was filled with LGBT people of every stripe along with hateful homophobes and no one came off as glib or one-dimensional. There was a prosaic lesbian heroine and a misguidedly villainous one, and an honest-to-goodness good and non-annoying Christian person (look, roll those eyes if you will, but that’s a very difficult construct to write *just right*). There are black people and white people and het people and Southern people and, and and, and and.

Everyone was beautiful and flawed and justified and off their rocker. They all came off as real people, not just characters in a book.

The plot is believable, even with the explosion thing; it’s definitely not inconceivable that a college based on tolerance would have a rocky relationship with the surrounding town anywhere in North America, and bigots with money do terrible things. Especially when they, like Eamon Douglass and Luanne Skinner’s son and a couple of other villains, feel like they have nothing to lose.

The writing is smooth and lyrical and highly skilled; there’s a massive number of characters and storylines to juggle (I thought a lot about that old tv show “Soap”) and Woulff makes all of it look easy. There’s shades of Patricia Cornwell in the tension and plotting, Rosamund Pilcher in the soap operaness and Clive Cussler in the action sequences.

(If, you know, Cussler could calm down and write believable women. Or one single LGBT person. But I digress.)

If it were up to me, I’d have this book available in airport bookstores, so that people who didn’t know they’d love it had a better chance to have it fall in their laps. That would be awesome.

And if we’re going to talk about awesome, we need to talk about Windfield College as a general concept. It could have gone horribly wrong and veered into parody, but instead, the complications that would inevitably arise from its existence were fleshed out and explored, with all the stones turned over so everyone — reader included — could stand around and talk about how mealybugs made them feel, or how stunning a glimpse of quartz is in rocky surroundings.

I realize I stopped making sense, likely, right after “Behold!” but trust me, at least it’s not eight minutes of dolphin noises. I am doing my best to write a review that’s worthy of this book.

I’m not sure I’ve succeeded, but Ms. Woulff sure as heck has. Here’s hoping for many sequels.

*Topaz is a yellow gemstone, so I’m guessing that his eye is blue flecked with gold, type of thing. But thanks to spelling anal-retentive with a hyphen, I had to go look that up.