For fans of Tales Of The City only, probably...

You can appreciate the story somewhat if you don't know the background stories that lead up to it, but honestly this book is really meant for the person who was either a fan of the Tales Of The City series from the beginning or who came into the wonderful world of 28 Barbary Lane in the early 1990s when the original PBS miniseries aired. This book in some ways is hard to read b/c it, more than any of the ones before it, is written IMHO by a gay man for a gay male readership.

I am a gay man but in many ways I am very conservative -- not politically, but in terms of relative relationship morality. I had some difficulty with the nonchalance of certain things in this book that I morally do not approve of... but, one thing this book has in spades is an *honest* vision of gay life in the SF area for people of that generation, and I deeply respect this book as well as its author for that vision. Particularly b/c while this story covers a gay generation earlier than my own, it does so with a uniquely Southern viewpoint. I too am a transplanted gay Southerner. Somehow, it works for me. :)

Anyway, I *tore* through this book much more quickly than normal for me, and I must admit it was b/c I wanted to see where things ended up. Many reviewers have criticized this novel for not really having an ending, for feeling like it just runs out of steam and stops. But IMHO that's actually one of its biggest strengths: the life of Michael Tolliver, and Anna Madrigal by extension, will not just end. The story simply pauses while we close the book's cover -- but it continues on in our hearts. I like the idea that somewhere out there in a mysterious corner of San Francisco someone finally got a happy ending all to himself, or rather, with his husband.

Or something like that.