Instead of diving into the existentialist rupture Andrea’s shifting identity presents, Johnson lets the trail go cold, leaving us with a resolution that, while no less lovely, is as cloudy as the Portland skyline. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Stray City: A Novel by Johnson, Chelsey hardcover very good Amusing story at the best online. Johnson falls into the very trap that she lays for her protagonist: Andrea is more driven by the fear of a complicated identity than by a desire to understand herself better, and as a whole, Stray City exhibits this same hesitation. The question of the latter’s sexual identity is absorbed into Lucia’s search for the person who contributed one-half of her genetic material, a shift that feels unsatisfyingly abrupt. Johnson, who grew up in northern Minnesota before moving to Portland, Ore., in the early aughts, draws on that experience in her debut novel, Stray City, which subverts expectations around. Stray City A thoughtful and joyous literary experience that celebrates its characters and liberally rewards its readers. just as we are getting somewhere with this fear, one that today we might identify as biphobia, the novel switches gears, splitting its focus to include Lucia and her own story alongside Andrea’s. Another is how it depicted queer community in such an authentic and meaningful way. Andrea and Lucia’s journeys to self-knowing are depicted with humor and compassion, and while the novel’s two Portlands, separated by a decade, are written with loving precision, Stray City nevertheless feels not quite complete. Though the story dips into the grim reality of homophobic hate crimes (Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepard were both murdered in the 90s), Stray City never loses. I enjoyed Stray City for a lot of reasons, and one of those is definitely its depiction of queer identities and relationships and how they can be fluid, and sometimes messy, confusing, and complicated.

Stray City by Chelsey Johnson