Lilac Mines

“Klein’s characters are compelling, one and all.”—San Diego Union-Tribune

"A quirky, quickly paced story of a young woman ending a relationship with a young woman then developing a relationship with another young woman: herself. Klein’s first book, The Commuters, was a fine debut. Second books aren’t necessarily as good. In this case, it’s better."--Noel Alumit, Frontiers

Felix Ketay, a twenty-five-year-old Los Angeles dyke, has her foundations shaken when she’s ditched by her pomosexual girlfriend and then gay-bashed on the streets of West Hollywood.

Felix’s old-school lesbian aunt, Anna Lisa Hill, ran away from home in 1965 at age nineteen and ended up in Lilac Mines, a small town in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills with a small but tight-knit butch/femme community.

When Felix joins her aunt in Lilac Mines hoping to discover a place of respite, Anna Lisa proves stand-offish, so Felix devotes herself to investigating the town’s one hundred-year-old mystery: the disappearance of sixteen-year-old Lilac Ambrose in the mine shafts that run beneath the mountain.

Felix learns that finding an authentic history is never easy, but Lilac Mines—with its abandoned mines, unknowable secrets, and the occasional quirky-cute thrift store employee—might not be such a bad place to try.

Cheryl Klein is a shameless Angeleno, quiet pescatarian, and shameful tabloid reader. She lives in Los Angeles where she is West Coast director of Poets & Writers, Inc.