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    Stray City: A Novel
    Stray City: A Novel
    Stray City: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    Stray City: A Novel

    Written by Chelsey Johnson

    Narrated by Natalie Moore

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    A warm, funny, and whip-smart debut novel about rebellious youth, inconceivable motherhood, and the complications of belonging—to a city, a culture, and a family—when none of them can quite contain who you really are.

    All of us were refugees of the nuclear family . . .

    Twenty-four-year-old artist Andrea Morales escaped her Midwestern Catholic childhood—and the closet—to create a home and life for herself within the thriving but insular lesbian underground of Portland, Oregon. But one drunken night, reeling from a bad breakup and a friend’s betrayal, she recklessly crosses enemy lines and hooks up with a man. To her utter shock, Andrea soon discovers she’s pregnant—and despite the concerns of her astonished circle of gay friends, she decides to have the baby.

    A decade later, when her precocious daughter Lucia starts asking questions about the father she’s never known, Andrea is forced to reconcile the past she hoped to leave behind with the life she’s worked so hard to build.

    A thoroughly modern and original anti-romantic comedy, Stray City is an unabashedly entertaining literary debut about the families we’re born into and the families we choose, about finding yourself by breaking the rules, and making bad decisions for all the right reasons.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMar 20, 2018
    ISBN9780062797476
    Author

    Chelsey Johnson

    Chelsey Johnson received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Her stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Ninth Letter, The Rumpus, and NPR’s Selected Shorts, among other outlets. She has received fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Signal Fire Arts. Born and raised in Northern Minnesota, she currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, and teaches at the College of William & Mary. This is her first novel.

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    Reviews for Stray City

    4/5

    47 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Excellent book in its writing and story.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      This is be a DNF for me. I'm halfway in and feeling bait and switched by a book I thought would be about lesbians that's so far about how thrilling and fulfilling it is to finally find the right heterosexual relationship with a wholesome dude and how catty and self-victimizing gay women are. I recognize that all communities have toxic subsections but when all female characters and all gay secondary characters are terrible people within a story it seems marked. And at this point halfway in, the whole theme of the narrative seems to be having LGBT characters state a believe about homophobia or sexism and immediately flipping the script so the single male character is cast as the oppressed and misjudged minority.And it's just not that fun to read - I'm putting this one down for good now that a lesbian character has told a pregnant friend that she'd rather hear she'd been raped than that she'd slept with a man willingly! The plot drags and drags - the back cover blurb describes this book as being about a lesbian mother who conceived a child after sleeping with a man while on the rebound from a breakup, but the entire first half of the book is instead just repetitive scenes of this woman and her secret boyfriend's slow burn relationship development and lesbians being shitty to each other!
    • 4/5
      This isn't my Portland story, but it is a Portland I recognize completely. I was helpless against its charms.
    • 5/5
      Stray City is about a lesbian who has a brief fling with a man and gets pregnant. A somewhat simplistic plot, maybe, but one that fully captured my attention because interwoven with the story are much bigger personal and societal issues. It is about the price queer people often have to pay to be who they were born to be – everything from being ostracized by family to enduring brutal hate crimes. It is about longing to belong and aching to be understood. It is about the constant choice between status quo and living true. Queer people will see shadows of themselves, their lovers, their community in every sentence on every page. Straight people will (hopefully) be enlightened that a gay lifestyle can be so difficult that it only makes sense that it is a biological imperative and not a heart choice. Stray City is heartbreaking and thought provoking, nostalgic and daring, tender and challenging. It is a marvelous book that is a much-needed addition to the canon of gay literature.