A review by shecastspells
Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest To Track Down The Last Remaining Lesbian Bars In America by Krista Burton

2.0

I found this book pretty disappointing. I was extremely excited to read it but the execution left something to be desired. The voice of the book read more like reading someone’s diary and was honestly exhausting to read. The descriptions of each of the bars tended to run together until there was nothing distinctive between each of the visits, and it feels like we lose the plot on why she’s doing this in the first place other than to go to all of these bars. It’s hard to pin down what type of book this is supposed to be: is it a travelogue, a memoir, investigative journalism? She introduces compelling subjects to explore in her introduction such as how will she be treated in these spaces when she is with her husband vs when she is alone, and how will her husband be treated, and this topic is never mentioned again. She spends a significant amount of time on how she believes others perceive her and feeling isolated from the queer community because she is femme presenting, and in her introduction talks about how she doesn’t care for her previous blog work because of her assumptions that everyone is gay in the same way she is, and then spends the entire book describing people in stereotypical ways and making broad statements about the queer community as a whole. Overall I found the book lacking. The most enjoyable aspects were the memoir portions, that’s were her writing shone, and I think Burton could write an excellent memoir about what it is to be queer and Mormon in the Midwest, which would resonate with so many.