User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Incredible book. Made me think about the meaning of freedom, and the functionality of idealism, especially when it comes to raising kids. Read if you're interested in rural life, poverty, lesbian motherhood, child development, living off the land, and chosen families.
Rating: really liked it
Well, this is different. Quirky, with a capital “Q”. And I liked it. Stay and Fight is about a makeshift family in Appalachian Ohio that gets together basically in order to help each other out. Two lesbians and their infant son have to leave their cabin in The Women’s Land Trust because of the sex of their baby. They come together with Helen, a woman stuck on a piece of rural land, dumped by her boyfriend. They build a house the best they can and for the most part live off the land with a clan of non-rent-paying black snakes, oh my!
The baby, Perley, is quite the boy. By age 7, though he still has quite the imagination with child-like thoughts and dreams, he has developed wisdom far beyond his years. Life is not easy for this family. They struggle mightily, not only for survival, but with each other. We are along for the journey as they persevere and make the best of whatever opportunities come their way. There are several supporting characters that are also hard up and show us in many different ways how they deal with all the adversity thrown at them. Some handle it well, others do not. There are so many wonderful themes in this story-- the third paragraph of the official blurb describes these more beautifully than I can.
Initially, I couldn’t figure out where this story was going (I had forgotten the blurb that I had read weeks previously). In fact, early on, I had some intrusive thoughts of DNF’ing it, something I rarely do. This cost the novel a star. But I pushed on and before long, I was totally engrossed and finished the last 55% in 2 days—fast for me. There was a lot going on at the end. At 95% there was so much to resolve that I wondered if the author was going to pull a cliffhanger, something that would have cost her at least another star. But, amazingly, the last 5% was beautifully done and provided a very satisfying ending. The last sentence brought goosebumps!
I highly recommend Stay and Fight (a most appropriate title) to everyone looking for a quirky, yet poignant, character-driven tale of adversity. The writing is beautiful, and the characters just burst off the pages. I will definitely look for more from Ms. Ffitch.
Thank you Net Galley; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Ms. Madeline Ffitch for an advanced review copy. Opinions are mine alone and are not biased in any way.
Rating: really liked it
Things I learned from Stay and Fight:
- people are mean
- people are even meaner to you if you're different
- and even more so if you're also poor or any kind of minority
- but it's still alright to be different
Stay and Fight was gritty, sometimes brutal and cynnical, real and rough, but it was also a gem, a pure wonder. It's told in a very honest and very raw way - you can basically feel, smell and see it all, because it's so colorful and full of energy.
And so I loved this book with incredible ferocity.
Read the full review here:
I thank the publisher for a free copy of the ebook through NetGalley in exchange to my honest review. This has not affected my opinion.Read Post On My Blog | Themed Bookstagram | Quick Update Bookstagram | Bookish Twitter
Rating: really liked it
I’m a huge fan of character driven novels, especially ones in which characters narrate their turn of events. In this incredibly quirky novel, “Stay and Fight” author and Appalachia environmental activist, Madeline Ffitch, provides the reader with the ugly downside of the gas pipeline projects. But it’s more than that; it’s also a story of survivalist sorts trying to live peacefully, outside social norms, in untraditional ways. This way of life becomes a problem for society’s do-gooders who want to banish those who don’t fall in line with their ideals.
Ffitch’s strength as an author is making her characters endearing and sympathetic. An casual observer could view the characters as being dangerous, malicious, and a bit crazy. Under Ffitch’s deft skills, the reader sees the characters heart and intentions. It’s a novel that forces the reader to take a pause in initial judgments of those who live an unconventional life.
Narrators Helen, Lily, and Karen are three women who live in the Ohio Appalachian Mountains. Helen came with her boyfriend, purchasing a few acres to scrape off a living. Lily and Karen are lesbians who want to live their lives freely. Lily is pregnant and the ladies plan to raise their child off the land. When their son Perley is born, the two women need to find another place of living, as they are in a woman only community. After Helen’s boyfriend leaves her, she offers her home to the women to share.
Perley starts narrating when he’s around 5 or 6. He’s an adorable narrator, providing the reader with his innocent points of view. He loves his moms and his “mean aunt” Helen. However, once he sees the school bus stop at the end of the road to pick up other children, he decides he wants to go to school. He just wants a friend.
Another fascinating character is Rudy, an arborist who has his own special place in the novel. If I saw Rudy in the streets, I’d keep my distance. In the novel, he is hilarious.
The life-style of the characters could make anyone blanch. When Perley goes to school with snakebite on his face, the officials get involved. Perley is one of the best characters in the novel, with his innocence and observations making the reader chuckle. The ladies have their own special chuckle moments.
It’s a story of misfits just trying to live their lives with the underlying message that pipelines will have serious social and economical consequences.
Rating: really liked it
Stay and Fight is one of those odd books that make themselves so very difficult to review, by way of being incredibly good and incredibly hard to pin down to why.
It's not going to be for everyone - the book kicks off with the story of a man who almost let his p*nis rot off one winter rather than see a doctor, and that's most likely the best way to let readers sort out for themselves whether they'd like to read this book or not. But it's really a book about three women who learn who they are and how to stand up for that, and for each other.
We rotate point of view among all three, and the author does a truly magnificent job of keeping the voices distinct. I could close my eyes, pick a page at random, and be able to tell you whose chapter this was, without hesitation. And they're all very real - flaws and quirks that make them feel truly human, will never putting me off by taking them too far.
It's an odd little book, this, but an enjoyable one, and definitely something I'd prescribe for a book slump.
Rating: really liked it
There are literal Easter eggs in this book so the characters-in-the-know can sneakily protect each other.
There are also figurative Easter eggs (here's how you destroy an oil excavator in case of, you know, zombies, wink-wink).
And now that I've finished, the entire book feels like an Easter egg. A secret, bitter-burnt love letter to those who love the green and mulchy earth. An egg for hatching snakes. A Best Practices Manual for quietly escaping the world's cruel and relentless Best Practices, escaping even the concept of Best Practices, and instead releasing ourselves into the brave imperfections of family and home.
I loved this book. I cannot comprehend the reviewers who say they couldn't connect to the characters. Or the reviewer who reduced their stars because there were too many 'gross snakes.' Like: go terraform Mars with Elon Musk OK and leave us the Earth and the snakes and the novels like this thank you.
Now I'm mad about people who hate snakes, but what I mean to say is: read this book.
Rating: really liked it
This book started out with a bang and then I felt like it really just kinda wobbled around drunkenly for the rest of the time, but in a way that only made it feel more real and grounded, and less like the fictional story it is. One thing that Ffitch does very well in this book is introduce you to characters and then make you absolutely despise almost every single one of them; I will be honest and admit that for quite a bit of the book I took that to mean that the book was awful, but I eventually came around and realized that the writing itself was very well done, and only through such good writing could I still enjoy a narrative with so few people I actually wanted to see succeed.
The shining points of this book were always any chapters shown from the eyes of a child, because these were another way that Ffitch showed her creative brilliance in just how accurate it felt to hear about the world through the eyes of a seven year old just trying to understand what's going on around him. I don't think this book was amazing or life changing and I am almost certain I'll never read it again, but I am glad that it was suggested as a feature for this month in my book club because otherwise I probably would've never given it a second glance or picked it up and that certainly would've made me miss out on some really great thought provoking points of social commentary that were sprinkled throughout.
Rating: really liked it
Thanks to goodreads and the publisher for the free copy! This is the story of a woman who moves to Appalachia with her boyfriend to live off the land (his idea). He quickly bails out at the first sign of difficulty. She stays and barely survives the first winter. Needing reinforcements, she invites a lesbian couple who need a new place to live. The have a new baby boy making them ineligible to stay on Woman's Trust land any longer. They mix with a hillbilly anti-authoritarian who usually has cheeto dust in his beard and an old depressed lawyer. They get by minding their own business for a few years. Of course, when the boy is old enough for school other people start minding their business for them. The villains aren't evil really, but like in life they are just principals and social workers and nameless corporations who need their land, just doing their jobs. With the over the top nature of the characters, the book probably shouldn't have worked. But it sure did work. It reminded me of The Monkey Wrench Gang with feminists instead of cowboys, hillbillies instead of polygamists. The fighting against the system was fun, but the characters were very well written, I came for the rebellion and stayed for the people. The narration alternates between first person takes of the three women and the boy and they all worked. The quirky boy raised like a wolf fantasizing of being an elf, able to live off the land but problematic because he can't navigate a tablet, was particularly entertaining. A fine book.
Rating: really liked it
Queer family (dyke couple + son + nonrelated "Mean Aunt") in rural Appalachia living a hard glowing life on the land that gets disrupted the minute their son interfaces with "Outside" via school; as the pipeline cutting across their acreage portends doom. Lots of grit and animal guts in this tale of tough love and chosen family (plus snakes) -- Zazen crossed with Mostly Dead Things with the bite of Dorothy Allison. I read this in two days, fell right in.
Rating: really liked it
I wish the world was full of novels about queer feminist anarchists in Appalachian Ohio.
Rating: really liked it
This book was excellent, and unlike anything I've read. Great characters, strong writing, and a story that I was thinking about constantly (still am). Also, the title makes a good mantra. ;) Never did I imagine myself googling black rat snakes, and I very much fear the popup ads I'll be subjected to, but I don't regret a thing. SUPERB.
Rating: really liked it
4.5 rounded up. I was actually really startled by how much I ended up enjoying this book. The writing was crisp and clean yet evocative. The shifting first-person POV really worked for me and I absolutely loved the way the differing personalities were revealed through the eyes of others. I even found the child narrator charming and hilarious, and I usually find child narrators deeply annoying. (Yes, even in Room! That's how good this was.) The one thing that kept coming up again and again is that everyone was an unreliable narrator towards their own life; everybody saw themselves completely differently to how the other characters saw them, and that felt very true to life while also being actually a pretty original way to tell a story like this, despite the fact that I've described it so poorly that I'm sure it sounds run-of-the-mill here. Perhaps for this reason, the book this actually ended up reminding me most of was Heartbreaker by Claudia Dey, which also had a really unique approach to multiple narrators, and also featured strong female familial relationships sketched across a brutally harsh natural landscape. (Of course that book is a dystopia, and this book is set in our regular old world. But still.)
This came up again in the main plot of the novel; I kept jumping back and forth and back and forth as to whose side I was on, as I'm sure I was intended to do. All the characters were vivid and written with a sense of deep love and empathy despite how critically flawed they all were, and that made for an uncomfortably conflicted yet brilliant read at times. Characters that initially seemed villainous to me seemed increasingly reasonable as I delved deeper into the storyline, and then tilted back towards antagonism. Everyone seems to have the best of intentions but nobody is totally sympathetic, and I really liked that the whole novel really lived in that moral grey area.
The setting of the story was another highlight. It had a vivid sense of place and the descriptions of the natural landscape and the family's homestead were beautifully detailed. There were so many small details that still managed to make a big impression and really brought the whole scene to life.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: really liked it
This book was such a disappointment. I saw a tiktok recommending it, put it on hold immediately, and was so excited many weeks later when I finally got it…and it’s just genuinely terrible. The writing is fine but not great, every single character except for maybe Perley is not only unlikable, but unfathomably stupid and irresponsible. The worst part though is that it reads sexist, homophobic, classist, and racist at various points in the story despite being seemingly designed to fight those things, and i don’t know if it’s intentional or if the author is just very out of touch. I am genuinely confused as to why anyone likes this book.
Rating: really liked it
Was this book amazing or insane? I still have no idea but I couldn’t put it down and I am still thinking about it. 1 Star for gross snakes and the vague quick wrap up at the end and for characters who just wont get off their asses not to be stupid. 5 stars for writing and telling a fascinating story I haven’t read before in quite this was and for being unputdownable.
Rating: really liked it
I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
3.75 but rounding up.
Let me begin by saying I don't think the blurb was accurate. NOT at all "hilarious." Certainly some humor, but... Definitely a novel about family and independent spirit. Also described as a protest novel--again, not a conventional protest per se, but an alternate lifestyle--way out of the mainstream.
Populated by strong, stubborn women--not necessarily likeable. Told in the voices of the main characters--Helen [Mean Aunt--who starts the novel], Lily and Karen [partners]; and their son, Perley--via sperm donor. Other, peripheral characters--one laughs the most at the descriptions of Rudy [in particular] and Aldi.
A story of love, persistence, and emotional and physical survival in the hils of Appalachia/West Virginia. A hardscrabble, basic life--by choice. Their diet and living conditions appalling. I didn't particularly care for the ending, but I'm not sure how I would have ended it/wanted it done differently.
I loved Perley--his world of elves and the wolves. His naivete. His fantasy/reality was, however, somewhat offputting because his [their] lives were [to me] dysfunctional--though it worked for them--to a point. Poor Perley, so out of sync, insulted/isolated. He wants to go to school; his moms resist, but he goes, at age 7--setting the latter part of the novel in motion.
And the snakes--who inhabited all the women's and Perley's lives. They too have a significant and vivid role in this story.
Some great descriptions:
Rudy: "...hairy face so full of sawdust it looked like he'd been breaded."
"I smiled to hide my heart, struggling to escape from my chest. My cheeks broke ice when they lifted."
"The loneliness was as insulating as a layer of snow."
"...rode to work listening to Springsteen, the only boss Jay said he could stand." Ha!
I recommend this book, but it's not for everyone.
