Iguana Love

Fun, fun, mystery noir style of story with the bang of a loaded speargun. The bonus is that it is a story that also makes you think and that you will carry with you even after the story has surfaced.

Iguana Love is a great title for this sizzling, sexy, and primitive ride through yet another dazzling Hendrick's adventure. Brimming with revealing details about the relationships between men and women and not being coy about it either, this novel has more smoothness than Miami Purity (which I LOVED). The situations are more plausible and the people more ordinary. One thing about Hendrick's writing remains totally unique. She lets you look at the world through the eyes of a hungry woman who is operating with boiled-egg coldness. Underneath though--there is always the lost little girl, the needful one, the pure-hearted...a great antidote to the romance novel...I like being in there mud wrestling with the heart's gore...I like meeting women characters who are complex...I like reading Hendrick's novels because I like exposure...the voyeur in you can't help but be enchanted by this one...

Ms. Hendricks is one of the few writers who can bring this male reader to any book with the word "Love" in the title, but I'm drawn once again to the textured sociopathy of her protagonist. This author's craft and control is so assured, you forget that she's a literary writer and just get sucked into the vortex of her people... which never thrusts them perkily upward. By bringing her aching beauty to the drift toward vile behavior, Ms. Hendricks has enriched the land of noir in a most soaring and satisfying way.

The "flinch factor" in this book is unusually high. There are moments in the story many men have been through at one time or another, and I don't think any of us really wanted to know what was going on in the mind of the other person present.I loved it and can hardly wait for Voluntary Madness to come out!

As always Hendrick's books are much more than the the men, or the tropics, or the sex. Hendrick's Iguana Love is a sorrowful, brilliant piece of American Literature that talks about the lonliness of one woman and her enstrangement from humanity. At the core of Iguana Love is a very desparate creature , rotating from one sensation, to another, searching for that one thing that will make her "feel" something. She finds it in exactly who she is looking for.. a remote and cruel lover: A man she can not love, a man who dishes out pain and finally, a man who will let her remain in her place of numb isolation. Romona compares her iguana to this lover: cold, remote, dangerous. But, the iguana is not Enzo, it is Romona. And like the iguana, Romona is not male or female. And, it is the vacant soul of both Romona and the lizard that makes them the mirror image. And, yet, in the end, when Romona lays herself, crucifixion style across the dead body of the lizard, the depth of her grief, seems boundless . This is terrifying, lovely painful poetry, NOT smut. Like the ocean Romona swims in, there is a dark unfathomable truth about all of Hendrick's work. Her women are lonesome, deformed souls, living in a place devoid of warmth, trust or love. It is an unlearned reader who sees Hendrick's work as just erotic or sexual. Miami Purity and Iguana Love are studies of the desolation of women in the remote and cold reality of the contemporary world.