Heartbreak on the High Sierra

Fiona Cooper

‘`I heard there was a place a woman could hang her hat up without any trash bothering her.’ This is the wary hope of the enigmatic, world-weary reporter, Helena Stanforth, aka Typewriter, aka Fools-rush-in, as she keeps moving west, `always a little ahead of what they like to call civilisation’. Hounded from Chicago to Crazy Man’s Coolee, all her dreams are at least realised in Kimama, the valley of the butterflies. Here, Suzanna LaReine and her pistol-packing outlaw crew wisecrack along in harmony until trouble comes in the form of Darknell van Doon, `an oil-tongued reptile pirate in a fancy suit’.

‘It takes a bizarre kaleidoscope of talent to finally crush him. Wisdom and magic; a trouble-shooting reporter with a marshmallow heart; the canny wiles of Isabella Bird; the mighty muscle of twin mud-wrestlers. Calamity Jane herself rises from the grave, and we find out what really happened to Amelia Earhardt after she ‘disappeared’.

‘Heartbreak on the High Sierra is a lesbian western in true spaghetti tradition, bubbling with thrills, spills, and suspense; a story that begins with cataclysmic storm and builds up to a rip-roaring climax; a romance where love and laughter reign supreme, and all the baddies bite the dust.’

From Publishers Weekly

Darknell van Doon, a land speculator, wants to drive a group of women from their beautiful valley in the Wild West. Sounds like a typical rehash–but our heroine–known as ‘Typewriter’–and the rest of the gang don’t need a man in a white hat to save them. These lesbian separatists don’t take kindly to strangers in Kimama, their sanctuary, a place where ‘. . . a woman could live and breathe . . . without a wedding band and petticoats to make her decent.’ This spoof of a dime western, full of impressive cussing and shooting, ventures into the absurd when Amelia Earhardt sic flies in from the future and Calamity Jane returns from the dead to help out. But Cooper uses or abuses conventions as she pleases, hilariously exploding the genre. The humor stems from the author’s scrambling of sexual stereotypes and her recasting of a standard western in terms of a struggle against patriarchy. Van Doon, ‘puffed up like a toad during mating season,’ is an inflated target representing man. But Cooper still manages to portray a group of real women, tough as any outlaw cowboys yet also showing streaks of sensitivity and understanding.

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Details

ISBN	1853810568
Genre	Fiction; Western
Publication Date	Oct-90
Publisher	Virago Press
Format	Paperback
No. of Pages	192
Language	English
Rating	NotRated
BookID	5229

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Heartbreak on the High Sierra by Fiona Cooper