L.A. differential: two lesbian novelists take us to a Los Angeles beyond the cliches.

Southland * Nina Revoyr * Akashic * $15.95

Crawfish Dreams * Nancy Rawles * Doubleday * $21.95

Heritage can creep up on you. Jackie Ishida, the heroine of Nina Revoyr's Southland, may be descended from Japanese parents, but she's as heedlessly cosmopolitan as any American city dweller. A law student planning a corporate career, she lives in Los Angeles's funky Fairfax district, with its mix of bohemians and elderly Jews, and makes a habit of dating white girls.

When the death of her grandfather sends her off to locate a beneficiary named in his will, Jackie finds herself in unfamiliar territory. She returns to the Crenshaw district, where her grandfather ran a store in the 1960s, and encounters unanswered questions about the decades-old murder of four black boys.

Through her research, Jackie gets her first-ever glimpses into her family's history.

"Her family didn't talk," Revoyr writes. "Her life had been flat and textureless as a starched white sheet."

Switching between the '90s, '60s, and '40s, Revoyr slowly fills in the details: the Japanese internments in 1942; the realities of segregation; the Watts riots of 1965. Soon Jackie has a whole new understanding of her past. It's painful but, paradoxically, a relief.

Like Revoyr, Nancy Rawles excavates one of Los Angeles's less celebrated neighborhoods in her latest novel, Crawfish Dreams. The neighborhood is Watts, and the time is 1984. Although the community's notorious riots are 20 years in the past, Camille Broussard, a grandmother who hopes to start a Creole restaurant, is still feeling repercussions.

"Due to the Riots, which she halfway suspected were not quite over, fire was her chief concern," Rawles writes of Camille. "She had a regular dream of being locked behind bars with a halo of flames licking her face."

Camille's offspring have likewise been scarred by those long-ago events, but to different degrees. Light-skinned Raymond, who left the neighborhood for Long Beach right before the riots, "would never forget how his neighbor recoiled when she realized he must be black if he came from Watts." Grace, a lesbian in her 20s who lives in Santa Monica and decks her car with left-wing bumper stickers, "would forever associate Watts with that furious week."

Rawles's craft may occasionally waver under the burden of delineating Camille's five other children, not to mention assorted grandkids, spouses, and neighbors, but it comes back strongly whenever Camille enters her kitchen. Descriptions of luscious Creole cooking provide a rich contrast to the city's barren surroundings. Camille's restaurant scheme may falter, but her meat pies and gumbo--recipes for which are included in the book--nourish hope eternal.

Lehoczky writes regularly for the Chicago Tribune.