Lilac Mines: A Novel

Summary

Felix Ketay, a twenty-five-year-old Los Angeles dyke, has her foundations shaken when she’s ditched by her pomosexual girlfriend and then gay-bashed on the streets of West Hollywood.

Felix’s old-school lesbian aunt, Anna Lisa Hill, ran away from home in 1965 at age nineteen and ended up in Lilac Mines, a small town in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills with a small but tight-knit butch/femme community.

When Felix joins her aunt in Lilac Mines hoping to discover a place of respite, Anna Lisa proves stand-offish, so Felix devotes herself to investigating the town’s 100-year-old mystery: the disappearance of sixteen-year-old Lilac Ambrose in the mine shafts that run beneath the mountain.

Felix learns that finding an authentic history is never easy, but Lilac Mines—with its abandoned mines, unknowable secrets, and the occasional quirky-cute thrift store employee—might not be such a bad place to try.