Excellent book in its writing and story. ( )

It's been about a week since I finished Stray City and I've thought about the ending every day since, specifically the last four words. There're only a handful of novels I've read that get that last line so right--so obviously written with painstaking care--that I feel like those words, and thus the story as a whole reflected in those words, will stay with me forever.

I adored pretty much everything else too, so. This one's a keeper. ( )

There is a lot to like in this well-written book, set in Portland, late 90's. The main character , Andy, is a young lesbian, mostly rejected by her conservative family, who is finding a home in Portland's queer/lesbian community. The book rings true to the place and time, and Andy and the portrayal of Portland are both very likable and relatable. There are parts of the book that I had mixed feelings about, but I can't go into those without spoilers. I also felt the book could have used a bit more grit; the ending was a bit sunshine and kitten wish-fulfillment. All in all, though, a good read and I will look for more be this author. ( )

i think i loved this. for sure i loved the excellent writing. part one's writing was just perfection. i had a little trouble, probably because of how much i loved that section, settling in to the voices in the next two sections. there wasn't enough time for me to fully get into ryan's voice and so that part didn't really work for me. part three i was able to settle into, but i never liked that narration quite as much as the first part. it might have been the point of view, it might have been the characterization, it might have been less interesting to hear from a child, it might have been missing the voice from earlier; but it was hard to match the early part of this book in terms of quality of writing and story, though, so while it wasn't perfect at the end, it was still excellent.

so that said, there's not much else that didn't work for me in this. it might have been a bit too long, but i loved being in the 90's queer portland scene, even as it wasn't a perfect place to be. i wanted andy to react differently to her parents, but it felt really realistic that she didn't, and that she wanted to keep the possibility of their being in her life. i wanted her queer community to react differently to her announcement, but it seemed realistic that they didn't. (and realistic that they came around.) i wanted her to be open and honest with lucia from the beginning, but understand that people make mistakes and can be overwhelmed with indecision. (i guess maybe the only hole in the book at all is that lucia was given a different backstory about her history and that was never addressed again.)

i think that some people will have issue with andy's dalliance, or the lesbian community's response to it. but i find both totally plausible and realistic and think that it is such a great conversation to have. both how she fits into the community and their response to it. not to mention her self-identity and labelling in spite of who she sleeps with. this book is a great vehicle for talking more about these things. i mean it's a truth that our community is divided about some things. that bisexuality (not that i'd actually call andy bisexual as she labels herself as a lesbian), especially at that time, was seen as a copout or halfway to being queer and a betrayal of the queer community. there's a lot in this book that's worthy of discussion and i'm glad she put it out there so that those conversations can happen.

i also love - even if this wasn't an intentional commentary by johnson - that this book follows the pattern of a traditional lesbian romance story, with some subversions, that really say important things. so andy is a lesbian, but she sleeps with ryan. in a traditional lesbian romance, she'd be in a straight relationship and have this surprising (to her) attraction to a woman, and act on it, thereby realizing her latent lesbian-ness and be happily ever after with a woman. so here she identifies as a lesbian and sleeps with a man, and afterwards still identifies as a lesbian. if, in a typical romance, the straight woman still identified as straight, or if she didn't stay with the woman, but went back to the man, it'd be problematic. from a queer perspective, that is. like johnson talks about, a bit, in the book, the queer community wants certain things from their queer representation, and there is some policing around what qualifies. i think there's a lot to think about here, as i'm just touching on the surface of my thoughts on it. but something strikes me as hypocritical in my community, that she's getting at with the story she's telling, whether or not purposefully. (in the book it's mentioned when andy is not considered lesbian enough after sleeping with ryan. but i mean even more than that.)

while i didn't like the second and third sections as much as the first, i was willing to go anywhere with andy because the writing was so good, and in the end i was ok with everywhere johnson chose to take us. this is well done.

"It was easy to mistake proximity for closeness."

"You could tell she hadn't lived in Oregon long -- she hadn't paled and moldered and gone woolly."

"It seemed in our urgency to redefine ourselves against the norm, we'd formed a church of our own, as doctrinaire as any, and we too abhorred a heretic."

on heteronormativity: "The unsolicited validation was stunning, and it kindled a new rage in me--rage that I could find almost no evidence of what I'd had with Flynn, or Vivian, or even living with Summer. Our worlds hardly even existed on record, while this one played publicly in endless permutations."

"There she was not a parent but a mom, a species held in somber, near-spiritual regard while being for all practical purposes steadily crushed by the forces of public policy, like the American bison."

from her sort of afterword: "I wanted to write about home and family. I wanted to capture the pain and joy of being queer, the familial baggage we carry and the ways we save each other and the ways we document our collective existence because no one else is going to. The farther away I moved from the community and life that I loved, the more urgently I needed to write about them. I tried to bottle a time and a place that I knew would soon gentrify out of existence and erode in my memory. I tried to make us real." ( )

My first ever Advanced Reader copy, received in exchange for an impartial review, and I'm glad I started with this one - 4 stars for the author, 2 stars for the editor, averaging out to 3.

For about the first 150 pages I was delighted with this book, and even though I've only visited Portland, a lot sounded familiar - a small alternative community in Portland in the 90's isn't all that different from my memories of small, alternative communities in Boston/Cambridge and way northern California in the late 70's, early 80's. The biggest difference might be which edition of [b:Our Bodies, Ourselves|10711352|Our Bodies, Ourselves|Boston Women's Health Book Collective|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388912212s/10711352.jpg|2411579] was on our shelves.

After page 150 I was starting to feel antsy and a little bored, no matter how warm and inviting Andy's story and her friends were. I get that we need to spend lots of quality time with them to really feel like we belong too, but it was starting to feel like day-to-day, real time. The thought of 250 more pages of this was definitely too much of a good thing. I persevered though, and happily Part 2 sped things up (for a while). Part 3 was a great move, plot-wise, but it felt like a combo of a Middle Grades novel (Lucia's voice) and a Hallmark TV movie (warm fuzzy family ending).

In sum, what I loved (not just liked) about this book was the effortless charm of the writing and characters, and their personal and political agitations, but I'm afraid that the heavy hand of nostalgia kept author and editor from controlling the pacing, and led to too much sugar at the end. ( )