Women's Barracks by Tereska TorrèsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I just finished this wonderfully odd book, but it was only after reading the reviews on this page that I learned it was some kind of lesbian genre fiction. I wont challenge that designation but it does feel like publisher marketing grafted onto a novel that defies generalized characterization. The book doesn't convey the impression that Tereska Torres set out to write a piece of genre fiction.
The story follows its characters through extraordinary circumstances. The war has placed them together, at different points in their lives, but largely in search of the same thing. Indeed they seek the answer to life, the universe and the meaning of everything, but they also seek love and companionship. Safety. Physical and mental comfort. They seek to fill their needs with and from each other. The relationship develop naturally, in way simultaneously novel yet easily understood. At times it takes on a pulpy air, but for every instance of seeming male, or lesbian wish fulfillment (with descriptions of perky breasts) there are passages of biting, visceral critique, reminiscent of Trumbo or Elie Wiesel. It is a book almost wholly void of political discourse, yet the consequence of those machinations, existing just off the page, are felt, perhaps just as they were felt by Torres, in the barracks. The war was fought and the war was won, but the cost is indeed terrible.
It is an imperfect book, but it's easy to understand why it continues to be read into the second decade of the twenty first century. It is a book that contains insight and truth about war, human sexuality and the unchanging needs of people. There is depth and ambiguity. And there is honesty. A book such as this will always have have worth.
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