SOURCE: "Wild Things," in Book World, July 21, 1996, p. 8.

In the following review, Hand argues that while the idea behind Our Lady of Babylon is good, Rechy's narrative is choppy and the novel is a disappointment.

Millenarianism appears to have spawned its own literary subgenre: Here at the end of history, novelists are rewriting history, real or imagined, often with deliberately Gothic overtones. So we have Theodore Roszak putting a distaff spin on bad science in The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein and Jack Dann doing much the same with Leonardo da Vinci in The Memory Cathedral; Anne Rice giving us Memnoch the Devil and an alternative history of hell, with Anonymous painting the Capital in similar shades with Primary Colors.

Now John Rechy joins the game with Our Lady of Babylon, which is nothing less than an effort to "redeem with the truth the lives of women unjustly blamed...