Julianna Carrbeaux

The Lactating Girls: a Novella Julianna Carrbeaux

SYNOPSIS: This erotic novel weaves together four related stories: Southern women who breastfed dying soldiers during the Civil War; a white college professor?s brief, intense affair with a former black classmate; a ménage a trois; and a meditation on how to keep sexual desire alive. Kambrah Garland first learns of the "lactating girls" from a plantation guide in Tennessee, who has discovered that Carnton was once the site of an act of ?selflessness? that became legendary in the 1860s. Two sisters lost babies at the same time and didn't know whether their husband-soldiers were even alive. Crazed with grief and the agony of bursting breasts, the sisters defied all decorum, ran to the tents that surrounded their plantation home, threw open their shirtwaists, and hoisted up the heads of two nearly unconscious soldiers. Encountering this provocative information at a lonely time in her life fuels Kambrah's erotic imagination, and she temporarily leaves her teaching job to take up residence on one of South Carolina's coastal islands. There, as she pursues her research, she also begins an affair with the son of her childhood "maid,? who is simultaneously engaged to a female marine and bedding a beautiful woman named Ann Farling. Little does Kambrah imagine the sensuous journey that will unfold as she struggles to reconcile her sexual fantasies with a proper Southern upbringing.