Stray City

Chelsey Johnson tells the story of a lesbian living in 90s Portland who has a straight fling that leaves her pregnant. 

How does a lesbian get pregnant in the first place? And what does she do with the pregnancy? 

Andrea is just a shell of a good child from Nebraska who goes to church with her family and bides her time being who they want her to be. She turns 18, moves to Portland for college, goes by “Andy,” and is finally able to be herself: queer. She becomes a part of the lesbian community in the city and finds a home here, staying even after dropping out of school. 

Set in Portland in the late 90s, Chelsey Johnson describes a place and time many of us want to go back to – even if we were never there. There is a community of queer punk kids who become queer punk adults and make families with each other when they no longer have support from their own. Stray City moves because it is told through many ways: first person narrative, third person, letters, voicemails, internet search history, and other forms.

Andrea becomes Andy and finds herself in the thick of the “Lesbian Mafia,” going to shows and swapping girlfriends in their ever-small circle. Reeling from a fresh, passionate breakup, she sleeps with a man . . . a few times. 

Andy is a lesbian that has a straight experience. This is a counter narrative where the straight experience is the weird venture, the one-off thing. At its core it is a story about community, learning who we are, and that life is not always a linear journey. 

Chelsey Johnson tells a story of navigating sexual experience in a real way. Andy is a lesbian at a time and place where “bisexual” is a way to stay in a safe gray space without fully coming out. She is not bisexual, she says, but she has to reconcile her feelings about Ryan, the one straight man she likes enough to sleep with. 

Sleeping with Ryan leads to a pregnancy that Andy ultimately decides to keep. She then has to navigate social expectations in queer communities as well as learning how to be a queer parent in a straight-parent society. Andy faces real fears like: what if her straight parents decide they want to fight for the right of the child? What if the home she has built in the lesbian community is broken with the news of her heterosexual activity? 

Andy brings us through how she deals with these new experiences, how curiosity and insecurity plays into sexuality and how we are not always our labels, even if we’ve used them to define ourselves in the past. Stray City is for anyone feeling a bit like a stray.

Reviewed by Emma Givens

Published by Harper Collins, 2018
ISBN: 9780062666680
Pages: 432

Ars Botanica: A Field Guide

Ars Botanica is a Bittersweet Memoir Through Letters to an Unborn Child

Ars Botanica is Tim Taranto’s first book. Part poetic memoir, part field guide, and written as letters to his unborn child, this book is both heartbreaking and heartwarming, oftentimes in the same sentence. 

The book is broken up by Taranto’s drawings: of flowers, of skulls, of packs of cigarettes, of Patsy Cline and fortune cookie fortunes and something that looks oddly like a diver’s helmet, but with feathers adorning its top. Each drawing comes with a Latin naming on the opposite page and a short definition. The accompanying description ebbs and flows into vignettes that go hand-in-hand with the narrative progressing through the story’s letters. 

Next to a drawing of a feather is the title “Barred Owl (Strix Varia)”. Below, Taranto writes:

Lacks ear tufts, large dark eyes, mottled brown “barred’” plumage. Native to the eastern United States, but range has expanded to include the Midwest, Iowa. Caterwauling call sounds like, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?”

           “I want to cook for you.”

           “Yeah, cook what?” 

           “Anything. I’m learning how to make ostrich sausage. I’ve been candying lilacs.”

Though the flaura, fauna, and other knick-knacks have their own pages, they are also integral to the story. Ars Botanica begins with a peek into Taranto’s head-over-heels romance with his ex-girlfriend. His ex is never named in the book, only referred to as ‘she’ and ‘her’, despite their unborn child’s name, Catalpa, heading up each section in a ‘Dear’-form address. Together and apart, they collect flowers, acorns, and the occasional flat, round pebble as sacred ornaments to decorate and declare their love for one another. 

Taranto expertly navigates through what he calls the ‘Blissed Out Era’ of their relationship, allowing the reader to feel the warmth of their love through the page as they sing Fetty Wap, bake a lamb’s head, and make out in Clark’s. The reader catches glimpses of the doom to come, the unplanned pregnancy that will result in the dissolution of their relationship. 

Though the book is letters to their unborn child, there is no judgement cast on the topic of abortion. In the book, Taranto allows his girlfriend to make the decision and supports her. There is no bitterness to the melancholy sadness as Taranto looks back on the ended love affair. At times, the book is darkly humorous, using dialogue to highlight the painful obliviousness of acquaintances as lookers-on. In looking back, Taranto is reflecting through his writing and by the end of the book it seems to be helping him to move forward, to understand through feeling fully what the experience was to him. 

Reviewed by Zoe Raines

The Sarah Book

           In the audiobook version of The Sarah Book, Scott McClanahan reads like he can’t wait for his novel to be over. He doesn’t rush, stumble, or falter, but instead adopts a distanced, impersonal numbness, letting his beautifully amateurish language and West Virginian accent breathe authenticity and life into his lonely world of Walmart parking lots and empty apartments, strip clubs and childhood homes. There’s an unshakeable malaise that comes with McClanahan’s reading that’s understandable; this book, and much of his writing, appears to be largely autobiographical (though he’s quick to deny this), and the lengths he goes to in order to reveal himself are at once shocking and absolutely refreshing. 

This novel finds McClanahan in new territory, plumbing the depths of loss, divorce, fatherhood, and every type of love one can think of. In The Sarah Book, the narrator, known as Scott McClanahan, ruminates on his relationship and eventual divorce with the titular Sarah, the mother of his two children and one of his only close relationships. The story jumps backwards and forwards in time (he’s cited Alejandro Inarritu and Saul Bellow as influences, though Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine also jumps immediately to mind), crashing together scenes of giddy, early-romance selflessness and genuine love with later scenes that are stark and heartbreaking. This bipolar, kaleidoscopic technique is not as rigid as one might think. For example, in one of the lowest emotional points in the novel, there’s a sudden appearance of sentient chicken wings. 

Scott McClanahan’s unending fascination with the ordinary fuels every layered, intricate moment; from the beautiful and meaningless conversations he and Sarah share to the mundanities of cleaning up after an incontinent dog, there’s a raw, diary-entry quality to the writing. The bare-bones prose is confrontational and the overarching themes are laid bare. McClanahan understands exactly what he needs to share and what he doesn’t. For the first time in McClanahan’s career, there’s a feeling of restraint, of things left unsaid, of stories unincluded propelling the stories that are. This creates a dizzyingly quick, fast-forwarded version of the lives of Scott and Sarah, the reader only catching the blur. 

The Sarah Book is Scott McClanahan’s most honest and astonishing work to date. It captures a complete world of fully-realized characters, their complexities and psychological trip-wires plotted out exactly. It is both a lightning-fast read and a heavy, difficult endeavor. No wonder McClanahan sounds exhausted.

Reviewed by Tom Ronningen

Published by Tyrant Books. 2017. 
ISBN 13: 978-0-9885183-9-1. 
233 pages.

Lady Midnight: The Dark Artifices

Lady Midnight is the first of the newThe Dark Artifices trilogy written by Cassandra Clare. The novel follows the lives of shadowhunters Emma Carstairs and Julian Blackthorn. Shadowhunters are nephelium, half-angel, half-humans, who kill demons. They’re on a mission to figure out why there have been a series of killings throughout Los Angeles that seem similar to murder of Emma’s parents five years before. 

The Dark Artificesis the third series in the Shadowhunter Chronicles universe – the first and second being The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices. 

Clare is one of my favorite authors and originally won my heart over in The Mortal Instruments. She continues to keep me enthralled with Lady Midnight.

The novel was a thrill ride from start to end and was definitely a treat for those who read the previous books. You get all the humor and action that you loved and there are even appearances from past characters such as Clary Fray, Jace “Insert Last Name Here” (he goes through quite a few of them), Tessa Gray,  Jem Carstairs, and a crowd favorite, Magnus Bane.

If you haven’t read the previous books, no worries! Lady Midnight has made its own mark with loveable characters, entertaining action, steamy scenes, and great adventure. There are so many interesting and complicated relationships, too. For instance, the forbidden love between Emma and Julian, desperation of lost love from our villain, and difficult relations between lost family members just to name a few. One thing I got from this read is, relationships are complicated no matter who they’re with. One thing I’d suggest is to always keep an eye on characters in this universe, minor characters included. You never know when they’ll show up again.

If you enjoy an addictive read full of action, some laughs, romance, and a whole lot of magic, I’d suggest picking up Lady Midnight.

Reading the first two series of books is definitely not needed but if you want to get all of the nice Easter eggs placed in the novel, it wouldn’t hurt. There is so much about this book and this universe that Clare has created; it’s hard to sum up the vastness of it all. This world of Shadowhunters, demons, and Downworlders is quite large and is still growing. Take a dive into it.

You can check out the next novel, Lord of Shadows, now! The last installment of The Dark Artifices, Queen of Air and Darkness, was released in autumn of 2018.

Reviewed by Courtney Gilmore

Published by Margaret K. McElderry Books
Published in 2016
ISBN: 1442468351 
698 Pages (Hardcover)

Witches Sluts Feminists

In Kristen J. Sollée’s book, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive, she writes: “The witch is at once female divinity, female ferocity, and female transgression. She is all and she is one. The witch has as many moods and as many faces as the moon.

Most of all, she is misunderstood.

With a pretty straightforward title, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive leaves no questions as to what you should expect to find in its pages. From the “All-American Witch”, AKA what really went down in Salem, to the “Political Witch-hunt” of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, this book will leave you with the what, why, and how of the words witch, slut, and feminist in our history. Albeit, “our” means mostly “American” in this case, but Sollée states right off the bat in her introduction that the Christian, Anglo-European view is so prevalent in the media’s perception of the witch that she decided to pick apart the biggest offender.  

Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive is a history lesson with a contemporary feel. It will educate you without overwhelming you with dry facts. It will answer questions such as “when did ‘witch’ become a negative term?” or “how has the internet changed witchcraft and the feminist movement?” with a plethora of sources, 225 in the 200 pages to be exact, from historians to witch-identifying people to historians who are also witches. 

Sollée’s voice is snarky, and her comments are brief but amusing. She never makes herself the focal point. This is not a person on her soapbox, shouting her beliefs at you for 200 pages. She is merely the vessel for the dozens of voices woven into the passages, telling their stories, findings, research, their histories. It is a cumulative journey, each sentence building on the last, each chapter carrying you further through time, showing you a history of adversity and of perseverance, leading you to the present-day identities of witches, sluts, and feminists.   

Reviewed by: Ash Dietrich 

Publisher: ThreeL Media

Publication Date: May 22, 2017

ISBN: 9780996485272

Length: 200 pages

House of Names

Relatability – it’s the one thing that makes a good book great and meaningful to an individual. So, have I ever sacrificed my daughter, kidnapped children en masse, or murdered my husband or mother? Well, no. No, I have not. But, I’ll forgive Colm Tóibín in this instance. His latest novel, House of Names, retells the classic story of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon in the aftermath of the Trojan War. I found that this novel was a very fast read – I probably could have read it in one sitting if I had a few hours available consecutively. Although the plot occurred over several years, Tóibín moves quickly through the major events leading up to and following Agamemnon’s assassination by carefully balancing the political events with the personal perspectives of his three main protagonists: Clytemnestra, Orestes, and Electra. I only know the basic premise of the story, so I can’t speak to how true Tóibín held to the original tale. Having familiarity with other classic epics, though, I can appreciate his adaptation of language, relationships, and mannerisms of the time to be more accessible to the modern reader while still maintaining a degree of authenticity. Overall, I enjoyed House of Names. It was an easy way to pass the time, and entertaining for what it was. However, it was largely unmemorable, and, I think, underwhelming in the light of its source material. 

Reviewed by: Kristin Rawlings

Scribner (Simon & Schuster imprint)

ISBN: 1501140213

278 pages

Marlena

Marlena is Julie Buntin’s debut novel about two teenage girls growing up on the edges of a forest in rural Michigan. It’s the raw coming-of-age story of Cat, a girl from the suburbs of Detroit and her growth as a character when she’s unwillingly thrown into a little nothing of a town where she meets Marlena, her “manic, beautiful, pill-popping” neighbor. Throughout the novel Cat conforms herself to Marlena, no longer wanting to be “Catherine,” the private school girl who coughs at the smell of cigarette smoke, but Cat. Marlena’s friend. Marlena is entertaining, Cat is interesting, this is very much a character driven story, and I really enjoyed every moment of it.

The novel is told through a distanced and mature retelling of Cat’s young teen years with chapters flipping from her life in Silver Lake and her current adult life in New York. Buntin artfully uses anchoring points throughout the “younger” chapters of the novel that keeps reminding the reader that this is a memory. I’ll admit that the first couple times that happened I was a bit thrown off. A voice would suddenly break into the telling that didn’t match the already established voice of fifteen-year-old Cat but once I realized who that voice was and what it was doing for the story, it really strengthened the moment.

This is Cat’s story, from the first time she sets foot in Silver Lake to her being an adult with a career in New York, but she’s oftentimes overshadowed by Marlena. Marlena is a wild child from the very first time the reader sees her in the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s pickup. Her personality is bright and eccentric yet tainted with a darkness that Cat couldn’t really grasp until she was older. Cat was just along for the ride, moulded by Marlena’s unique allure. It would have been easy for Cat to become a background character; she’s quiet and often times unsure of herself, but Buntin kept her at the forefront of the story. The voice of the character kept her interesting even if, seemingly at first, the character herself wasn’t. The first person narrator was a perfect choice and Buntin did a great job with it.

This is a story of more than just sex, drugs, and lost childhood. It’s about friendship, family, and self-discovery. It’s about loss and growth and everything in between. I think this is a story worth listening to and the artful and unique telling kept me reading even when I knew that I should go to bed.

Reviewed by Cali Luisa Lemus

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Publication Year: 2017

ISBN-10: 1627797645

Number of Pages: 274

October 02, 2018

Guidebook to Relative Strangers

Guidebook to Relative Strangers is the blueprint of breaking down communication barriers and changing the view of our troubled world.

Award-winning writer Camille T Dungy is acutely aware of what it means to live on the crossroads: she is a writer, a mother, and an African American woman. In Guidebook to Relative Stangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, she poetically intertwines history with her present. This weaving of events helps readers understand not only why history is of great significance, but how to “interpret—and not disdain” people.

The opening of her book begins with a conversation she was pulled into among her peers. This experience sheds light on a catastrophic detail that comes from privilege: the obliteration of communities of people. She connects this to why history is an all-consuming experience to many, including herself.

“There is something about privilege that can place one in a position to erase the realities of others. . . my life and flesh and family and history demand that I recognize [others] where and how I can.”

Dungy ties this awareness of erasure with the way she raises her daughter. Her young daughter experiences moments completely disconnected to history but that does not devalue the importance of it.

“I notice, now more than ever, what I don’t know, and what I want to know, and what I want to share with you, Callie Violet. I want to name the world correctly.”

Dungy shares how and why a traffic stop is something feared by African American men. She shows readers the realness of this fear when she intertwines her traffic stop while with her family with those that happened before and after her. 

“Our routine traffic stop happened just a week after Texas police shot and killed thirty-eight-year-old Jason Harrison, a black man. And one month earlier, Eric Garner, a black forty-three-year-old father of six, was choked to death by New York Police Department officers. It was six weeks before Ferguson police shot Michael Brown, and five months before Cleveland police shot and killed twelve-year-old Tamir Rice. . . .”

           Despite all this trauma, Dungy still gives the benefit of the doubt to all those she encounters.

“I am, for one thing, more prepared to interpret—and not disdain—other people’s potentially flawed communications. . . I am, I believe now, more prepared to be accepting of the humanity in all of us.”

            History is alive all around us. Take some time and become aware of how it connects to you.

Reviewed by Maria Mendoza Cervantes

Published by W. W. Norton Company on June 13th 2017

ISBN: 978-0-393-25375-7

240 pages

September 04, 2018

Sourdough

Sourdough by Robin Sloan is a high-stakes story about baking sourdough bread. While definitely strange-sounding, it actually isn’t too far from the truth. Within a short novel, Sloan managed to create a fast-paced story that skillfully kneads magical realism, actual science, and a heart-warming story into a filling meal.

The story follows Lois Clary, a software engineer, who gets into the habit of baking sourdough bread after the owners of her favorite restaurant are deported.  The restaurant’s owners, Beoreg and Chaiman, left Lois with a sourdough starter that has been in their family for generations. For those of you who aren’t bread connoisseurs (I know I’m not), a sourdough starter is a mix of wild yeast, flour, and water that won’t die as long as you continue to feed it; essentially it’s what makes sourdough sour. But unlike normal starters, Lois’ starter is rather moody and otherworldly. It needs to listen to unidentifiable foreign music, can’t be treated roughly, and emits glowing lights when in a good mood. Strange.

That’s about as far as the magical realism in the story goes, and honestly, it didn’t need to go any farther. The rest of the magic comes from the science that appears throughout the novel. Like I said earlier, Lois is a software engineer at a robotics company in San Francisco. When her bread becomes a huge hit at work and she’s recommended to try out for one of the city’s many farmers markets, she ends up at the Marrow Fair. There, science and food collide with LED grown produce, laser-roasted coffee beans, honey made from radioactive bees, and bacteria-produced Lembas bread (yes, like the kind from The Lord of the Rings).

Sloan has the ability to combine science with fiction in a way that seems totally plausible. You could tell me that all the science and history in both of his novels are completely fiction and a part of me would honestly be sad. His ability to make the reader believe in his words that is perhaps the most incredible part of his work. As readers, there’s a certain level of suspended disbelief that we will always carry. But with Sourdough, no matter how impossible the science might seem, there never seems to be a reason to suspend it in the first place.

While the main story of this novel focuses on Lois and the Marrow Fair, one of my favorite aspects are the little emails sent to Lois by Beoreg, the restaurant owner. In those emails, we learn more about the mysterious Mazg people he and his brother hail from and his own family history, the tone of which remind me of bedtime stories told to me as a child. And with just one side of the conversation, Sloan managed to create a naturally progressing relationship between Beoreg and Lois that doesn’t feel forced or rushed.

Sourdough is a beautifully written book that appeals to the child-like wonder we all still hold as adults. If you’re a fan of tech, food, and strong female characters, this is the book for you. If you’re a fan of books that leave you quietly smiling as you turn the last page, then it’s definitely the book for you. But just a warning, this book will definitely leave you a bit hungry!

Reviewed by Celeste Paed

MCD Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published on September 5th 2017

ISBN: 978-0374203108

272 pages

August 07, 2018

The Doll Funeral

A quote from Shakespeare’s Richard II begins this supernatural coming-of-age novel: “…even through the hollow eyes of death I spy life peering”. On her thirteenth birthday, Ruby discovers that cruel Mick and passive Barbara are not her real parents. Instead of letting the information devastate her, Ruby is elated. Surely her real parents must be out there, somewhere, searching for her? Blowing out her candles, Ruby wishes only for one thing: for her parents to come and find her. What follows this fateful wish is a journey deep into the woods, where Ruby meets three siblings just as lost and lonely as she is, and the answers to questions she never thought to ask.

The novel’s narration is divided between thirteen-year-old Ruby in 1983, living in the Forest of Dean with her adoptive parents; her birth mother Anna, pregnant, terrified, and seventeen-years-old in 1970; and the imaginary Shadow boy, Ruby’s one constant companion. It becomes clear very early on that there is something different about Ruby: she can see and talk with the dead. Ghosts and spirits seek her out, some helpful, some less so, some as overlooked as Ruby feels.

A gripping exploration of how the past can haunt us, even when we do not know the whole truth of where we come from, The Doll Funeralexists on a cusp for its majority. We meet Ruby at the threshold of her teenage years. She is looking for family, for home, for everything she has never had. The quest for these essentials takes her deep into the woods, to a long-forgotten mansion and the three children trying to survive in its cluttered, death-cold interior. It is with these three siblings that she begins to understand what home really is.

In 1970, Ruby’s young birth mother faces her own struggles, chief among them whether or not to put her baby up for adoption. Anna is convinced that the baby’s father, Lewis, would never accept either of them. In the end, she decides to keep the baby, and Lewis tries to do the right thing, proposing to Anna and whisking her and Ruby off to London for a fresh start.

The fairytale nature of the narrative creates intrigue, setting up mysteries it is in no hurry to solve. As the narrative progresses, the timelines condense. The truth about what became of Ruby’s young parents is revealed: a tragic tale of a loveless marriage and post-partem psychosis that ends with a car accident on the roads within the forest. The origins of Shadow and his connection to Ruby are similarly exposed, and every gap filled in. While the pace suffers slightly in the middle, when each of the three narrations reach their tipping point, the end is worth every minute. “I was a scavenger for family,” Ruby tells us. “And what I found was love and souls.”

As haunting as it is captivating, The Doll Funeral is an unexpectedly moving tale of finding yourself and what it means to come home. An excellent read for anyone who has ever searched, longed for, and lost.

Reviewed by Grace Smithwick

Faber and Faber Ltd, Melville House

Published On: August 15th 2017

ISBN: 057131385X 

336 Pages

July 10, 2018