Orginally published in 1976 and re-released as a Virago Classic, Lisa Alther's Kinflicks remains remarkably fresh and provides the perfect read for a plane ride into another time zone. The hilarious odyssey of Ginny Babcock, a Southern peach gone rotten, was a manual of self-determination and irreverent pleasure for 70s feminists. Incredibly raunchy and explicit about anal sex, orgasm, vibrators, Tantric sex, blue balls and lesbian trysts, it is hard to believe it was written before Annie Sprinkle became a post-porn icon. The colourful, ribald prose begins with Ginny's childhood with a mother who's "an aficionado of calamity" and a father who anticipates an ugly death after an accident with a wedding ring, then cuts to Ginny returning to the hospital bedside of her dying mum. Each family first is captured by a Kodak M24 Instamatic-- hence Kinflicks, but not Ginny's deflowering which is "as meaningful as the breaking of a paper Saniband on a motel toilet." When Ginny drops out of college, takes to the land and to lesbianism in a steam of boiling soybeans, the inadequacy of her rural expertise is brilliantly told. Her subsequent marriage is interrupted by a Nam deserter-yogi. Each identity shift is marked by impressive wardrobe changes: cone bras, cardigans buttoned up the back, girdles, Ban the Bomb T-shirts, patchwork dresses and finally sadly, polyester jumpsuits. In a deft finale, mother and daughter reconcile without sentimentality and Ginny learns how to forego a life of fruitless self- denial and look death and singlehood in the eye. --Cherry Smyth

Genre: Romance