My Amazon and Goodreads review of Jazzed by Jill Dearman (Rating 5) – Note Perfect. Awkward Wilhelmina (Will) is obsessed with social butterfly Dolly. Both girls are talented musicians, Will on clarinet, Dolly on piano. Dolly is turned on by jazz and crime; Will is turned on by jazz and Dolly. In a master-slave lesbian relationship, that occasionally turns the tables, Dolly blows hot and cold while Will boils with desire and freezes with the fear of desertion. To guarantee the erratic Dolly’s love, the compliant Will agrees to do anything, even murder a fourteen-year-old boy. Thus unfolds a gender-bending version of the scandalous 1924 Leopold and Loeb case. Dearman captures the Zeitgeist of the era — prohibition, antisemitism, social snobbery, homophobia, and the perceived threat of “Negro music.” The writing is itself a riff on jazz, at times syncopated and lively, at other times sustained and lugubrious. Like jazz artists, the protagonists trade solos, then meld their sounds. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admire the fluidity with which Dearman shifts between styles as smoothly as a versatile musician. She takes us into the minds of her fully developed, complex characters, while also portraying their families’ social status, the legal system that traps them, and the medical establishment that purports to “treat” their sexual deviance. Jazzed is a note-perfect novel.
A gender-bending twist on an infamous crime story
Why writers read: “Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” – Malorie Blackman
