Originally published in 1985, a speeding ticket and a blown-out car door bring together the titular Dancer Dawkins and the California Kid one fateful night on the California interstate. Together with spunk, tenacity, and some help from a grouchy Korean and her German shepherd, the two women manage to successfully pull Dancer’s girlfriend from the dumpster fire of a late 80’s cult.
This book is something I realized that I’d been searching for a long time: a piece of queer literature that doesn’t care about the fact that it’s queer. Dancer Dawkins and the gum snapping California Kid happen to both like women and it doesn’t matter. It’s a feature of their stories rather than the focus. In fact, it’s poked fun at. A lot of the recent mainstream queer literature that I’ve encountered (and queer characters) are so defined by the fact that they’re queer. I want queer stories where queerness isn’t the selling point. I want stories like this book where the characters are characters beyond who they love. The California Kid is defined by the fact that she’s always searching for the perfect Vanilla Ice Cream. Dancer Dawkins is a college dropout. The Kid gets panic attacks and Dancer has asthma. And they both love women.
The book is—at its core—a heist book. The thing that Dancer and the Kid are trying to steal (or in this case rescue) is Dancer’s hapa-haole girlfriend Jessica, who has been seduced by a cult’s promises of enlightenment and emissary status. I love heist books. I don’t need thrillers or mysteries, I just wanna know the gory details of how the protagonists are going to drug, lie, and steal their way into whatever vault, bank account, or heart they need to get into. Dancer Dawkins and the California Kid delivered that anticipation with an Americana twang and a Vietnam War backdrop. I was on the edge of my seat as Ta Jan (the Korean American woman from Hawaii with balls of steel) went toe-to-toe with Fatin Satin Aspen, the leader of the Venerable Brigade; a lean, mean, sweater knitting, money laundering machine. I sighed with relief as the Kid narrowly escaped discovery and put the pieces together about the drums of Agent Orange lying in wait in Fatin Satin Aspen’s secret wine cellar. The tension was real.
One of the things I wasn’t expecting from this story was how funny it was. The whole story was told with a sort of frankness that made the characters and their reactions feel real. Their dialogue and narration were snappy and honest and made me laugh out loud more than a few times. Even the names felt like the narrator was having a little bit of a laugh: Fatin Satin Aspen. Dancer Dawkins. Willy Gutherie. Killer Shep. The story felt full of life and laughter and more than a little tension.
If you’re looking for a book with spunk, stakes, and more than a little romance, you can look right here at Dance Dawkins and the California Kid.
