Kamikaze Lust [Paperback]

Lauren Sanders is a writer of extraordinary skill. Without wit or heart, this much sex would be unsexy, particularly if the author were using the titillation factor as mere bait for jacket blurbs. Instead, it serves a broader purpose, illustrating that the boundaries we use to demarcate civilized society are largely an illusion, and that labels like porn star, cancer patient, and lesbian are meant to signifyfalselypeople nothing like us. Here sex bleeds so naturally into life, and life into sex, that books that shy from this human realm begin to seem prissy and suspect. Sanders zips and zooms through Rachels overturned life with prose as sharp, quick, and deadly as any suicide mission. The fact that Sanders can so overtly take on sex and death, write almost exclusively of their relationship to each other and their effects on a developing personality, and not sound clich?d, is a monumental achievement in itself.