Last Chance at the Lost and Found: Soo Hood

Last Chance at the Lost and Found is about growing up. It's about thinking that you want something at one point in your life and discovering that you're not really ready for it until later, after you've had a chance to learn some things. It's also about the power of friends and struggling through life when things get tough without giving up. The story follows twenty-five years in the life of Bunny LaRue. Bunny is beautiful and has a body toned on the beaches of California, so she is a natural to be a model in a racy catalog playing the "bad girl." She spends her days posing and her nights working her way through the women in the lesbian bars. Bunny appears to be a golden girl who can do no wrong until things begin to go off course. She loses her job and the woman she loves desperately rejects Bunny because she doesn't seem to have a proper purpose in her life. Life just gets tougher as Bunny drifts in her personal and professional experiences without any sense of direction and comes to realize she is an alcoholic. The one constant in her life is her friend Michael who is always there to help her pick up the pieces, but, as she begins to turn her life around, Michael discovers he is HIV positive. Bunny struggles with Michael's illness, her addiction and finally finding a career she's good at, but she can't escape the feeling that her life is hollow. When she gets another chance at love, Bunny gets to call on her life lessons to see if she is finally ready to make a relationship work. Last Chance at the Lost and Found was the first winner of the annual Bywater Prize for Fiction and it's easy to see why. This is a sophisticated and complex story. When it opens, Bunny LaRue is not a very attractive person. She lives too hard, is too self-centered and puts her own needs ahead of everyone else. It's no wonder the woman she loves leaves her because it's tempting for the reader to leave also. The excellent thing about this novel though is to watch as Bunny transforms herself. Things don't always go smoothly, but there is a sense that Bunny is learning from what happens to her, even negative events. It's interesting to see her improve herself and her life as she grows with maturity and experience. The process will be very familiar to many women since they probably went through it themselves. By the end of the book, the reader will be pulling for Bunny to achieve what she is searching for, a meaningful relationship that brings love into her life. It's well worth the time the reader will spend with the book.

Welcome to first publication author Marcia Finical, winner of the Bywater annual writing contest. Despite my lack of exposure to lesbian literature I found Last Chance at the Lost and Found to be touching, sensitive and a delightful read. Last Chance is an interesting, touching and tender coming of age novel. It parallels the sexual revolution of the 60's and 70's and draws to a close some 20-25 years later after Life in the Real World has bounced her around. Bunny's journey of self exploration as she seeks meaning to her life and her quest for true romance takes her to in-depth places of both seediness and silliness in Los Angeles and San Francisco. She is indeed touched by the AIDS epidemic and her own self-enlightenment. Bunny ages well, takes a few wrong turns as she meets several memorable characters along the way. Any of the support characters could well be a novelette in itself. This is hard to do in an initial offering for an author who wants to be taken seriously. Developing one strong character takes skill, but leaving a reading wanting to know more about the other supporting characters she encounters is a talent well worth developing. Author Finical should be welcomed to the literary circle of talent; read by several both straight and gay and as her fan base grows, we should clamor for more. Hopefully Finical will be able to respond.

Finally we get the first of the prize winners from Bywater's annual writing contest and we know why it won.It is well-written and holds the reader's interest all the way through. We follow Bunny LaRue through more than twenty years of her life and trace her love for Sunshine Lindstrom through the same years. Finical presents us with a chorus of memorable and well-drawn characters beginning with Bunny and including her best friend Michael and the different women Bbunny is, or wants to be, involved with. Perhaps the most delightful of the characters is Barbara, the rodeo queen, and the most endearing is Ella from AA. Each of the supporting characters touches and changes Bunny's life. Here's hoping we hear more from Marcia Finical.