Faultline

I laughed out loud reading this book. Sheila Taylor's characters really ring true to me. What seemed most real was the way each witness at the custody hearing saw the situation from his or her own little world. So often in novels the viewpoints of minor characters mesh too easily with the viewpoint of the main character. In the real world, people are absorbed with their own experience. When you "interview" them all, as the witnesses in Faultline are interviewed for the trial, you get a wonderful multi-dimensional sense of the community in which the story happened. The fact that some of the characters are lesbian is an important part of the plot. It is not just an average romance novel. The complexity of the story is what gives it distinction.