#multiple!

and the homophobia is there in the background, and sometimes it happens in real time in the text, but it’s never granted a position of power. Her characters are always outgrowing and discarding old wounds from a homophobic culture and finding new gentle funny ways to defeat it in the here and now. In her three-book series about the kitchen diner run by a lesbian couple, we go through one knot of homophobic resistance after another and emerge better and safer on the other side every time. While that plotline plays out, the lesbians in the periphery of the main characters meet each other, fall in love, break up, and lend each other a hand all the time— and yeah, they’re not unscathed by homophobia but they’re always on that trajectory to a place where it doesn’t matter so much.