The Island Only an Island When the Ocean Allow It: A Queer Romance. (Galveston Bookstore: An LGBTQ+ Literary Odyssey)

A Queer Literary Comedy. An Odyssey for a drowning island.Galveston, September 11, 2001. Twenty-two-year-old Amy Smart watches fighter jets shred the morning sky over her gingerbread Victorian and is summoned across the street, with shaving cream still on his jaw, by the man who will become her grandfather—Mister Thomas, Navy veteran, gardener, philosopher, smoker of fine local cannabis, husband to the magnificent Ms. Elsie, whose gumbo "could negotiate peace treaties."So begins The Island Only an Island When the Ocean Allow It, a sprawling, tender, deeply funny novel that uses Homer's Odyssey and Joyce's Ulysses as scaffolding for something entirely its own: a portrait of a sub-tropical island and the chosen family that gathers on it.Inside these pages you will meet:The wise elders of Freetown, whose front porch is the moral compass of the entire bookA magnificent, gin-soaked, opera-quoting bookseller named Jon Alex, and the boys who love and fail himA pregnant lesbian bartender from Peoria who has fallen in love with a man pretending to be straightA defrocked working-class East Texan who meets the Virgin Mary on a mushroom trip and chooses, ever after, kindnessA mafia princess who plays bass like she's "dissecting a butterfly"A villain so wounded the novel makes you grieve her before it lets you fear herGhosts—of the 1900 hurricane, of the AIDS years, of every Galveston that has ever been swallowed and rebuiltAnd Amy herself: bookish, bohemian, bruised, becomingThis is a novel about love between women, between unlikely neighbors, between the living and the dead. It is a novel about the moral weight of the names carved into every street sign. It is a novel about who feeds you when the world feels wrong.It is funny. It is filthy. It is reverent. It is, above all, alive.For readers of Armistead Maupin, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and anyone who has ever loved Joyce but wished he had more dogs. Read more