Charting By The Stars by Linsey Abrams (All Editions)

Linsey Abrams‘ debut novel chronicles one girl’s coming of age from a 1950s childhood into the New York of the 1960s. A love affair with another woman sets off a profound reckoning with identity and self. Ms. Magazine compared it to Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, and The New York Times praised Abrams’ distinctive voice, calling her style a mixture of introspection, common sense, daydreaming and recollection.

Genre: Fiction, Grier Rated

Subjects: Coming of age; Lesbians – Fiction; New York

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Comments

Charting by the Stars (1979) is Linsey Abrams’ first novel, and it announces a writer with a precise, unsentimental eye. The story moves through a young woman’s adolescence and early adulthood, tracing the slow accumulation of experience that leads her to a relationship with another woman — not as a dramatic revelation but as a natural extension of who she is becoming. The period setting, spanning the postwar years into the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, gives the novel its particular texture: a world where identity is being invented in real time, both personally and socially.

The book received serious attention on publication, with reviews in both The New York Times and Ms. Magazine placing it in the company of literary fiction rather than genre writing. Its long print life — spanning three publishers over nearly three decades — suggests a readership that kept finding it. It is not a landmark in the way that some of its contemporaries are, but it is a careful, accomplished novel that deserves its place in the bibliography of lesbian literary fiction.

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Publication History