Nina In The Wilderness
When in 1972 Anyda Marchant was forced to retire from practicing law due to health reasons, no one could have predicted that the then-61-year-old would co-found not one, but two independent lesbian presses and publish 14 of her own lesbian novels. But she did. Well, as Sarah Aldridge she did, and she has become one of the most beloved of lesbian authors. [...]Nina is a young woman who, several years before the story begins, is the sole survivor of a plane crash in which her parents are killed. She is found by natives in the Costa Rican jungle and is finally brought to safety then returned to the United States where she receives in-depth psychiatric care.  The story revolves around Nina, her long-deceased aunt Albertine's poetry, and Annie Trewarden and her father, Gerald Trewarden, the renown Nobel peace prize-wining poet and mentor to Albertine. Nina and Annie meet when Nina seeks out Gerald Trewarden in an attempt to locate her mother (whose death Nina cannot accept).Trewarden is about to be nominated for another Nobel Prize and the authorship of "Last Words for My Lover," the poem for which he is nominated, is in question. Did Trewarden write it? Or was it written years earlier by his student Albertine? Can claims that it is Albertine's be proven? Can Trewarden's son protect his father and his father's reputation?  [...]Unlike Aldridge's other novels, there is a bit more mystery to Nina in the Wilderness and, it seems, a larger cast of indispensable characters. But, once again, this is a most enjoyable story told as only Aldridge could tell it. And, while there are areas that would not suffer from a bit of tightening up, Aldridge's painstaking attention to detail is not for naught.One of the first lesbians to write to shatter the myth that "the guy always gets the girl in the end" or the girl must be punished or die if she is a lesbian, Aldridge has just successfully completed her 14th happy-ending lesbian novel. Nina in the Wilderness is thoroughly enjoyable and extremely easy to recommend, whether during that rainy day curled up inside or for that day at the beach. --Lambda Book Report,August 1997