Psychoshop, by Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny (1998)
So often I get letters from readers saying, "What ever happened to good old fashioned sci-fi romances, those great tales of boy meets snake-girl, snake-girl hisses at boy, boy and snake-girl go at it every ten pages for the rest of the book?" Good news! The romance lives on in Psychoshop, in which Alfred Noir (boy) meets Ssss (snake-girl), and the two of them form a sub-plot to give themselves plenty of room to mess around. The main plot breaks in mercifully from time to time to save us from all the writhing and slithering and so forth.
Alfred Noir is a reporter writing a story on The Black Place of the Soul-Changer, a pawnshop where the motto is "Res Ullus" ("Anything"). Let's say you'd like to get rid of a bad temper, or you'd love to be able to dance. Or let's say you have ESP but would prefer to have free cable. Or you live in the 30th century but would feel more at home in the 10th. Just drop in for a consultation with Adam Maser, proprietor and cat-human. As Alfred Noir works on his report and helps around the shop, he begins to discover he's a little more involved with this place than he'd thought: it's the seven clones of himself dangling dead in the storeroom that clue him in. Meanwhile, Adam's hot-'n'-snaky nanny Ssss (aka Glory, aka Medusa) is doing a little personal investigating using very sneaky methods.
The plot is fascinating (what would YOU pawn? and what would you buy?); the writing a little choppy and definitely All Boy: lots of sex, lots of fighting, lots of macho businessman humor.
The Stork Club, by Iris Rainer Dart (1992)
I believe I've mentioned before that I don't have high hopes for a book if the cover is done in metallics. My hopes fall another notch if the author photo looks like it was done at Glamour Shots. Maybe YOU can't tell a book by its cover, but I can.
I admit, however, that occasionally I make a mistake: I liked this book well enough to put the author's name on my library list so I'll remember to see what else she wrote. If the characters were two-dimensional and the stories too tidy and the dialogue inclined towards sentiment ("Her smile makes it all worth while"), that didn't mean I couldn't read all 400 pages in three days, forgoing chores and errands and television until I was done with the book. I'm not saying it's mesmerizing or excellent or whatever, but I am saying I enjoyed reading about the many ways that people have babies when the traditional conceiving-on-the-honeymoon method fails to fit their lifestyle. One couple hires a surrogate, one middle-aged single man adopts an unwed teenager's child, one gay man and his loving-but-just-best-friends female roommate employ a turkey baster, and one single woman purchases donor sperm from the same donor twice so her two children are full siblings.
All of the characters are united in the cutesily-named "Stork Club," a group organized by a psychologist who wants to help non-traditional families through milestones like "Where did I come from?" It's fun to read about these methods and issues, and it's clear the author called in a textbook or an expert because several times the dialogue is used to lecture on the scientific details.
The Mourners' Bench, by Susan Dodd (1998)
Leandra hasn't seen her sister Pamela for years, not since Leandra was a child and Pamela left to go to school far away. Pamela has a difficult pregnancy and asks Leandra to come help, but it turns out Pamela didn't want Leandra there---it's Pamela's husband Wim who wants help. Wim feels helpless with his wife's depression and thinks Leandra's presence will bring his wife back to her old self. There isn't anything Leandra can do for Pamela, but the relationship she forms with Wim is so memorable that years later when he's dying of a brain tumor he comes to find her and be with her for the time he has left. I thought the book was good laced with excellent. It includes the most memorably heart-breaking funeral ever: I went back and re-read that part several times because it was so perfect.