My Girl Is Your Girlfriend And His Too By Dahni McPhail

Title: My Girl is Your Girlfriend and His Too

Author: Dahni McPhail

Publisher: Dahni McPhail

Summary: A homophobic woman who is at first unaware of, then later, in denial about her true desires follows her sister into the military and from that moment, has various encounters with women that involve friendship, camaraderie, love and chaos all leading to a shocking conclusion. Entitled My Girl Is Your Girlfriend, the manuscript is written entirely from the viewpoint of a young woman and is an emotional first person account full of dialogue that is true to the characters and their situations. The language is contemporary, raw and unapologetic. This is not just another military story. This is true to life fiction and a real and personal representation of young Dahni McPhail finding herself, experiencing the reality and dangers of obsession as well as life threatening circumstances evolving from toxic relationships and love gone mad.

Review:

The tile of this book is a bit misleading as it will give the reader the idea that there is a love triangle between two women and a man. It’s a bit more complicated than that. The only connection I made between the title and the content was the fact that the main character spends 90% of the book holding on to a heterosexual identity. The summary does not exactly match the content either since we never hear about the sister that the main character supposedly followed into the army.

I had a love/hate relationship with this novel. Love because I’ll never feel there is enough representation in LGBT literature, so it’s always nice to come across a “family” title. Love because it was in a military setting, which almost never happens. Love because there was more than one character to read about, and love because it made me uncomfortable (I’ll explain).

Now to get to the hate. Hate, of course, may be a strong word so let’s use frustrating instead.

The writing was not sophisticated and was obviously written in the vernacular of the author as she said things like “fighting on you” to describe the physical abuse of one character to another. The more I read, I realized she was obviously from the East Coast. There was also an overuse of the work dyke, so depending on how you feel about it, I’d proceed with caution before reading as you may cringe quite a number of times.

This novel had the potential to be so much greater than it was had the author focused more on “showing” us what was happening between the characters rather than “telling” us. There was a lack in chemistry between each character for me and their relationships felt rushed. Dahni loved Sealyn after sex and letter. She loved Mimi after a few barely there conversations and cuddling. And Michael Friday was in love in less than two pages of reading. I waited for each connection to get to the next level but it never happened. What did happen was my discomfort.

The sex and rape scenes between the characters pulled me back and forth. I applauded the author for being bold enough to not only insert a consensual sex scene into a lesbian novel, but to do so with the stud as one of the consenting adults. I cringed at the very thought of this masculine identified woman being penetrated and even giving oral. It was nauseating, but in reality, it happens.

The rape scene made me feel the exact same way only with less permission. I wished that the author had involved as much detail in other parts of the novel, like character descriptions and scenery. It came here and there but not enough for me to see it in my mind.

If I may back up a bit, the first three chapters seemed to drag on about basic training. I found that bit to be unnecessary, yet later understood the emphasis that she was trying to put on the cruelty of “The Jackal”. Still, overdone and repetitive.

Dahni, the main character, was downright annoying. She had at least five plus physical encounters with two different women and still by chapter nine was claiming to not be a lesbian.

I wanted to give this book more than three stars, but technically, I couldn’t. There were little to no dialogue tags, making it difficult to follow conversations or know who was speaking. The word “hAdrian” was splattered all over the pages in random places where defined words should have been. Chapter 21 was headed twice. There were separations in conversations that were not needed and the main character’s thoughts were not properly formatted and ran into the speech of others.

This novel was anti-climactic until it reached the thirteenth chapter and when it finally got to the point, it was predictable. The one thing I did not see coming was the survival of Sealyn. ‘d be up for another book where these characters are involved because all in all, it was entertaining, if nothing else and there is a lot of unfinished business.

I don’t recommend this book to the faint of heart. To everyone else, go for it.

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