&quot;In 1970 I realized that the Sixties were passing me by. I had never even smoked a joint, or slept with anyone besides my husband. A year later I had left Nicky, changed my name from Ellen to Rain, and moved to a radical lesbian commune in California named Red Moon Rising, where I was playing the Ten of Hearts in an outdoor production of Alice in Wonderland when two FBI agents arrived to arrest the Red Queen . . .&quot; <br><br>So begins Blanche McCrary Boyd's brilliantly raucous account of self-styled feminist outlaws, their desperate adventures and extraordinary fates. Ellen, the narrator of Boyd's previous novel, <b>The Revolution of Little Girls</b>, this time pierces the heart of the sexual revolution in her quest to find a woman hero or--by default--to become one.<br><br>Ferociously paced, Terminal Velocity delineates six wonderfully engaging characters: Artemis Foote, for whom being rich, talented, and beautiful is a kind of game; Jordan, a messianic fugitive who becomes Ellen's lover; Amethyst Woman, a Marxist/Leninist dentist; Ross, a red-diaper baby and now a columnist for Ramparts; and Pearl, an art history professor turned hippie. At the center of this vortex is Ellen, prior to her transformation happily married and a rising young editor at a genteel publishing house in Boston. Together with these women, she is caught in the political and moral tailspin of the Sixties, living in a sexualized world-without-boundaries that leads them, eventually, to destruction, acceptance, and even redemption.<br><br>Deadpan funny and exquisitely moving, <b>Terminal Velocity</b> brings Boyd's lyricism, humor, and depth to material largely unexplored in American literature.