In Thrall: A Novel

“Dear Miss Maxfield…what I’m really afraid of is that I am a homosexual human being. I wish you were one too but I don’t think it’s possible there could be so many in one school, do you? –probably there is only one person who is homosexual in one place at one time and that one person (I am afraid) is me….”

Sixteen-year-old Lynn writers her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher a letter, and they embark on one of the funniest–and saddest–love affairs in one shrouded in secrecy and guilt. This is the early sixties, years before gay liberation, when all Lynn knows about “lezbos” is that they wear their hair in crew cuts, buy suits like her father’s, and sprout mustaches over their upper lips. Lynn, in her desire to appear “normal,” continues to make homophobic jokes with her girlfriends, neck with her boyfriend, and play the innocent with her parents, even as she checks the mirror each night for the telltale signs of her “perversion.”

In this profound, witty, poignant, and highly charged novel, Jane DeLynn proves herself a writer of the first rank.