“Beautiful Inez takes us into the heart’s uncharted territories, where two unlikely lovers come together in San Francisco in the early 1960's--the beautiful Inez, a concert violinist and unfulfilled wife and mother of two, and the impetuous, passionate bohemian, Silvia, who sees in Inez her own salvation. A memorable, risk-taking novel that gets the people, the time and the place just right."
-- Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander
“Accomplished, rich and ambitious. . . . Schneider's subtle depiction of Inez's depression and death wish is so good--so devastatingly persuasive--that it deserves the lion's share of my attention here. But I wouldn't want to slight the book's other facets. Beautiful Inez is also, for one thing, a compelling and notably unpoliticized portrait of a lesbian love affair in pre-Stonewall America. . . .[Schneider’s] persuasive and affecting treatment of Sylvia and Inez not as martyrs or heroes, but as mutually besotted people who happen to be female, is refreshing, even liberating. . . Like the infectious fragment of Schubert that haunts Inez through its last pages, Beautiful Inez is hard to get out of your system.”
—Chicago Tribune
Schneider describes the unfolding seduction and love-making between the two women with an astonishing blend of sensitivity and graphic detail. . . . And this is not merely a story of Inez's coming out. This is a love story, in which a woman drowning in sadness discovers intimacy on a level never before experienced or imagined. . . . Schneider shatters glittering facades to reveal sheer ordinariness, betrayal, abuse, evaporated love and tragedy. But there also is beauty, talent, filial and erotic love and, above all, the truth of things, realized in characters we come to care deeply about. "Beautiful Inez" is a novelistic liebestod that shimmers with humanity.
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Beautiful Inez is a marvelous performance by an artist who has made his language by turns syncopated and then shimmering, as if an entire life and landscape have been laid out for the enthralled reader in fluid song. Inez weaves through the narrative, haunting and intense and unforgettable"
—Susan Straight, author of Highwire Moon
As in Secret Love, Schneider explores with great sensitivity the way that confronting our inherited sense of the forbidden can unlock us from ourselves. But this time he sets himself an even more daunting task: as a male writer, to explore that theme through the lens of two female characters and to depict those characters' inner lives in the most intimate manner. Schneider meets these formidable challenges superbly, perhaps because he uses music as the bridge across the divide between himself and the women in his story. Inez and Sylvia are powerful, unforgettable characters, but they are made so in large part through Schneider's description of the music they share. . . . A brave novel and a resounding success.
—Booklist