A Year of Full Moons — Madelyn Arnold

Lambda Award winner Madelyn Arnold combines history, class, sex, and family in A Year of Full Moons, a tour-de-force about the coming of age and coming into power of a young girl in a hardscrabble southern town during the early 1960s.

Brilliant, tomboyish Josephine Margaret Butler--better known as Jos--is the second oldest child in a large, poor family living in provincial Summit, Kentucky, in 1963. After her mother has a miscarriage and retreats into herself, Jos and her sister Ellie have to run the household and take care of their five younger siblings and their decidedly eccentric, sometimes brilliant, and always difficult father.

In the coming year, the nation's mounting tensions over civil rights and the Vietnam War finally begin to infiltrate Summit at the same time that Jos begins to act upon her secret passion for women. Trapped in a damaging family dynamic and in a town that is violently resisting the sweeping social changes of the outside world, Jos realizes that only one thing--her intellect--can provide a means of escape.