cheye13's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Graphic: Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Classism, and Kidnapping
Moderate: Misogyny, Pregnancy, Grief, Suicide, Bullying, Lesbophobia, and Racism
Minor: Drug abuse, Gun violence, Excrement, Gaslighting, and Sexual content
also note: eco-terrorism, snakes; a large part of the plot involves a child [subjectively] wrongly taken into foster care; a number of tense/dangerous and near-death logging scenes; jail time for trespassing; discovering a suicide; most prejudice warnings are for flippant dialogue, except for a brief scene involving an overtly racist and misogynistic man, dealt with accordinglyktkeps's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Graphic: Misogyny, Panic attacks/disorders, Sexual harassment, Suicide, Alcoholism, Classism, Death, Domestic abuse, Grief, Lesbophobia, and Bullying
eschorrlesnick's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Graphic: Animal death
Moderate: Classism, Vomit, and Suicide
Minor: Forced institutionalization, Homophobia, and Sexual harassment
3mmers's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Disenchanted Seattlite Helen migrates to rural Appalachia with her boyfriend and the romantic notion that they’ll buy land there and live pastorally off the grid. She is quickly disabused of both boyfriend and romantic notion of off-grid life, and turns to survival with the aggressive single-mindedness of a mother grizzly but none of the charm. She’s got the kind of terminal know-it-allness that only pacific north-westeners can develop. She recruits for the mission Karen and Lily, a lesbian couple who won’t be able to stay on their women-only commune after the birth of their son, Perley. Helen demands more than offers that they live with her on her land while raising their son. All three women are united by a non-conformist tendency, but that doesn’t mean they’re a natural team. Helen is aggressive and condescending, insisting on her way of doing things despite demonstrably less competency than the two locals. Karen is domineering and cold but also deeply insecure and passive-agressive. She only feels okay when receiving visibly preferential treatment. Lily is the youngest partner and the most passive. She casts herself as the peace keeper or scapegoat of the group rather than objecting to choices she dislikes. As a unit, they’re immensely dysfunctional, but they manage. They build a cabin and it is draughty and sinking on one side, but a home nonetheless. This far from the rest of the world they’re free to truly survive. Helen and Karen in particular finding fulfilment in the genuine battle for life. They forage, hunt small game, and collect road kill, surviving the winter on stockpiled acorns, sleeping side by side with the ubiquitous black snakes.
Spoiler
All is well until Perley, at age seven, insists on public school and the harsh eye of the wider world is turn on their unconventional lives. The wider world does not approve, not of their living situation, not of their diet, not of their relationships. Perley is removed by CPS and placed in a foster home unless the women can meet a seemingly insurmountable list of conditions. All three of them retreat into their bad habits. For Helen, it’s her stubbornness. Nothing was wrong with the way they were living and it was ridiculous of CPS to suggest otherwise. She wants to keep going on as before, as a show of principle. For Karen, it’s her insecurity. With her relationship to Perley challenged by the state, she withdraws further, leaving for the pipeline construction crews up north in an effort to make the money their little unit needs to get their kid back, not that she’d ever communicate that. For Lily, it’s her passivity. She slips into a depression slumber and emerges willing only to take the most extreme course of action, refusing the most realistic. Scattered to the winds, it is unclear whether this family can pull itself back together.I’ve painted a pretty unflattering portrait of these characters, and it’s not unwarranted; they’re meant to be tough to be around with unsympathetic personalities. A big part of Stay and Fight’s message is that an unlikable personality doesn’t mean one is unjustified in their cause or their needs. The most discomforting part of these characters is how much I see myself in there. Reading this book was like looking into a mirror of my own most self-destructive tendencies. Like Helen, I know I can be way too stubborn and I have a compulsive need to be in the right. Helen compiles a ‘Best Practises Binder’ to record the most optimal technique for every aspect of off-grid live (how to skin a snake, how to empty a pit toilet) which none of the others consult because they don’t need a guide on the proper method for things they’ve been dong their whole lives. When I was a kid I had a best practises notebook too. Even as an adult is is almost physically painful for me to endure a person using the ‘incorrect’ procedure for something or doing things in a suboptimal way. Seriously, when my co-worker opens all her messages and chooses the easiest to respond to, rather than opening and completing them in order from least to most recent, i.e. the correct way, it drives me fucking insane. Like Karen, I know I can be way too insecure. I’m plagued by the certainty that barely anyone remembers me outside of immediate interactions. I also often misinterpret statements in their worst possible light and it makes me look like an absolute shithead. Rejection sensitivity makes me into my worst self. And these things are painful to read about! I talked about this a bit in my review of Thorn by Insitar Khanani, but while relatability can often make people feel seen or their experiences represented, sometimes it fucking sucks. I don’t like the parts of myself that are like these women. I wish I could get rid of them (I tried, and spent a good amount of money on therapy; it didn’t work that well). It’s uncomfortably and upsetting to sit with the worst parts of yourself and watch them do all the things you hate yourself for doing or are afraid you’ll do. I am once again running out of words to articulate this with.
With the power of distance and reflection I feel like I can now better appreciate why the characters are like this and what their abrasive personalities are meant to contribute.
Spoiler
Helen’s stubbornness is almost compulsive and influenced by a history of boyfriends steam rolling her preferences. It is the reaction to eternally being an odd duck, unable to really relate to any members of her family. It was Helen’s boyfriend’s idea to move to Appalachia at the beginning of the novel, and Helen’s commitment to survivalism after that is an assertion of independence in doing the thing that he told her she couldn’t. Karen is ultra-sensitive to rejection but she has good reason to be. As a butch woman from an undemonstrative family, she has had to be stoic her whole life, and her masculine lack of emotionality is paired with an equally masculine fear of rejection. Her relationship with Perley is seen as non-existent in the eyes of the law; she is an ‘unrelated adult’, not his mother.Spoiler
At the end of the novel, everyone does manage to come home. Lily abandons her fantasies of righteously kidnapping Perley to make up for all the times she could have stood up to Karen and Helen but didn’t, and finds work arounds to really reach him during their visitations. Helen opens herself up to new possibilities and doing things for which she doesn’t know the best procedure. In the final scene, Karen gets the reunion with Perley that she feared letting herself dream of, where the two of them do share a special parental bond that goes beyond DNA.The characters can be genuinely uncomfortable, but I started off with a softball to myself so I could warm up for the tougher topics.
Spoiler
When Perley is taken by the CPS, the state has a couple major reasons for his removal. One, that Perley is surrounded by too many ‘unrelated adults’ (Karen and Helen) and needs a conventional (straight) parental relationship, is easily unsympathetic. But the other, that the conditions he lives in were insufficient, trouble me. Perley is alone and often unsupervised. He is underweight. He interprets his world according to the cultural hierarchy of wolf-riding elves in his favourite fantasy comic series, the only fictional media he has ever encountered, which gives him a deeply twisted way of viewing his world. For example, ‘fun’ and ‘play’ are unimportant, there is only ‘duty’ and ‘preparation’. Love is conveyed through the cold assignment of increasingly daunting challenges, rather than through affection. At least for me, it was a pretty upsetting way for a seven-year-old to think.This is going to sound ridiculously out of touch and bougie compared to Stay and Fight’s hardscrabble Appalachian life, but this is where it hit me. A lot of the food and the survival stuff in Stay and Fight was triggering for me. I grew up with a parent whose number on priority was a lifestyle that he enjoyed. I learned pretty early on that objecting to something that he wanted, whether due to preference or due to fear, was unacceptable. My life, when it was amenable to be included in his at all, was about supporting the image of an independent outdoorsy family, not my own comfort. I first went ice climbing when I was eight or nine, not because ice climbing was a particularly good activity for nine-year-olds (it wasn’t; I was too weak and scared of the slippery frozen waterfall to climb more than a couple steps so sat getting wetter and more miserable on a vaguely horizontal chunk of ice), but because ice climbing was something my dad wanted to do. When I was growing up there were a lot of rules about what sorts of foods we were allowed to eat. Lots of foods that were okay for others were not okay for us. When Perley begs to eat mac n cheese for dinner, even though he has never tried it and therefore could not possibly know if he was craving it, that’s my whole childhood right there. I wanted to eat mac n cheese and pop tarts and fruit roll-ups not because I liked the taste (I tried my first pop tart at age 17) and not even because they looked good (they didn’t), but because I wanted to eat like other people ate. I didn’t want to be the only kid in the cafeteria with strange and ugly lunches containing things like aubergine or purled barley. Now, as an adult, intellectually I do understand that all my parents wanted to do was for me to grow up healthy and with minimal cavities. I know that being able to do so many outdoor activities was a privilege that very few kids experience. I get that it is actually kind of hilarious that the nickname my bullies chose was ‘cow cheese’. Is not most cheese a cow derived product? But emotionally it still hurts. Emotionally, I desperately wish I’d been fed mac n cheese and that by the principle of ‘you are what you eat’ I would subsequently become normal. Emotionally, I’m not reading a book about characters doing fictional actions to convey a particular story with its own meanings and messages, I’m watching my own childhood again where I was lonely and strange and unpopular because that’s what my parents wanted to be.
I always have trouble with books narrated by weird little kids. I discovered this first years ago with Room by Emma Donoghue. That might seem like a weird pull, but both Perley and Room’s Jack are deeply strange kids who lack the experience to understand just how unusual their lives are. They move through the world with the naive certainty that if they are different, it is because they are uniquely talented or powerful. The ultimate product of love and isolation, unprepared for how others will encounter them. I see myself a lot in these weird lonely little boys. I didn’t have a lot of close friends growing up on account of multiple regular international moves and a period of homeschooling. I always had difficulty judging how others perceive me; my sensitivity to rejection comes from being a kid who didn’t even understand enough about others to know they were mocking me. I’ve been caught out, blind-sided by unexpected hatred and disgust from people who I thought liked me so many times that that is simply my default now. It is painful to see these characters. On a certain illogical level I hate them. I hate them for being so insulated, so unsavvy, so loved that the confidently put their foot in it over and over again. I don’t have a good relationship with my inter child, that’s the other reason I quit therapy.
Are these kids okay? Are they weird but still healthy? Stay and Fight argues so.
Spoiler
Lily steals Perley’s brain medication hidden in plastic easter eggs and throws it out into the dirt so that he never has to be anything other than the son that she loves.Spoiler
that all the family is flanged but they love each other.Spoiler
The section about Perley’s removal by CPS and Karen’s discovery of the looming threat of the pipeline indicates a society even harsher than the Appalachian winters, one that punishes non-conformity with the unfeeling coldness of a concrete wall. In such radically independent living, a kid who doesn’t play because he needs to help gather acorns or empty the pit toilet is necessity, not abuse.In hindsight, a big part of my animus for this book comes from a poor recommendation. Back when I first started keeping an organized tbr over a year ago, this was one of the first books I added. I don’t even remember why. Some vague recollection of a tumblr post pitching it as a heart-warming cottagecore-esque narrative about Appalachian lesbians and the power of community. Part of the reason I was so shaken by it was I was utterly unprepared going in. I was excited to be getting to a book I’d been wanting to read for a long time. Over the summer I read ‘Indian’ in the Cabinet, the political memoir of Indigenous Canadian politician and former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould. Wilson-Raybould was candid about her disillusionment with the politics of liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who used their appointment for optics then refused to pursue her priorities (Indigenous reconciliation) and hung her out to dry when she refused to allow transparently illegal liberal party politicking. Nevertheless, Wilson-Raybould remained optimistic for the future of reconciliation on a federal level and the ability of federal politics to clean house enough for a genuinely equal nation to nations acknowledgement to be possible. That’s more along the lines of what I was expecting from Stay and Fight. Perhaps if I’d been better prepared for such an uncompromising, contrarian novel, I’d have had a better time with it and could pitch it to you today as the literary equivalent of eating your spinach.
This novel does have valuable things to say. I’m sure I could pick out some more if I re-read it, but I won’t. The greatest tragedy of this read is that despite my reflection, despite coming around to many of its ideas, I already know I won’t ever be able to really appreciate it. I’ll never be able to see it as a narrative.It will never be successful or unsuccessful for me because I’m not reading about the characters anymore, I’m reading about myself.
Spoiler
When Perley hikes away from his foster placement back to his home and finds Karen, his pack leader, waiting for him just like he knew she would be because he was so isolated his sole interpretive framework was a fantasy comic series and so the only way he knew to expect affection was as stoic silence,Moderate: Death
Minor: Homophobia, Child abuse, Classism, Lesbophobia, Domestic abuse, Racism, and Sexism
melaniekarin's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Graphic: Classism, Injury/Injury detail, Death, Lesbophobia, Suicide, and Bullying
heynonnynonnie's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
I struggled with figuring out how to review this book. I ended up listening to some interviews that Madeline Ffitch did and reading through other reviews on Goodreads and in opinion pieces. I didn't feel like the book was hilarious or even the "delightfully raucous" that I've seen tossed around in some reviews. If this book were a person, I'd call it a "son of a gun" and "old bastard" before buying it a round at the bar. It's gritty, cynical, real, but also filled with a bit of wonder that gleams through the cracks if you manage to catch it just right. Filled and built on the brave imperfections that are associated with the found family trope dialed to the max between three women who learn who they are, how to stand up for that, and eventually, for each other.
I felt that the novel was a decent exploration on the intersectionality of gender, sexual identity, racism, classism, and environmentalism because it forces the reader to pause their initial judgments of the unconventional. Because of this, I'm not sure that I can judge this book on a good/bad binary system like I try to do, so instead I think I'll dive into just one theme that I thought about constantly.
I think the concept that I toyed with the most while reading was the meaning of freedom and the functionality of idealism. There's an underlying tension between absolute freedom of choice and the constraints of life's givens. The book is concerned with freedom and what it means to be free, but also the ethics of that freedom. The more that each woman attempts to justify their individual concerns and goals, the more that they are unable to accept each other and deny the others freedom in order to validate their attempt to give their life meaning. Freedom isn't just a plot of private property in which you kick out the world. It isn't just living up to a subjective and but ultimately external goal. And it isn't an ideal world free of conflict. I think the book's focus is freedom as a process, rather than an outcome, and that the pursuit of one's own freedom is also conditional on the freedom of others. Which necessitates a system that recognizes and evaluates conflicts - to stay and fight through competing interests and choices rather than to run away, to oppress the freedom of others, or to shut down. Ultimately, all four of the POV characters come to terms with freedom as a process from different angles.
Moderate: Classism and Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Racism and Lesbophobia