The Stud Book

February 25, 2013
Sarah works at the Oregon Zoo in Portland, Ore., monitoring animal behavior and mating activity while trying to carry a pregnancy to term after several miscarriages. Her academic friend Georgie is on maternity leave with a largely absent husband and a “French feminist tramp stamp.” Dulcet and Nyla, the other half of this friend foursome, are a bit older: Nyla has daughters in high school and college; photographer and sex-educator Dulcet has a medical marijuana prescription and a “living anatomy lesson” in the form of a bespoke latex suit covered with “an anatomically correct illustration of a woman’s internal organs... with the vulnerability of the inside lacing the outside.” All four are native Portlanders, and while Drake’s interest is clearly women’s lives and the push-pull forces of biology, what really stands out is her depiction of their city. This is not the twee wonderland of Portlandia—it’s a place where anything potentially usable goes on the curb with “paper signs screaming FREE!” despite the inevitable rain that turns would-be recyclables into a “multileveled mold collection.” Drake’s characters don’t just remember an older, more run-down city, they seem to inhabit it: Nyla opens a store in a dicey neighborhood, her daughter goes to a subpar school, day laborers wait for work. While the women’s specific plights don’t always carry enough weight, Drake (Clown Girl) combines their lives in a quirky, knowing way, showing the complexities of modern-day female life, species Pacific Northwest native. Agent: Seth Fishman, the Gernert Company.

February 15, 2013
Drake (Clown Girl, 2006) pointedly avoids sentimentality in writing about Portland friends who approach sex and procreation with varying degrees of desire, fear and trepidation. The central character, 38-year-old Sarah, studies animal habits, especially regarding procreation, at the Oregon Zoo; the novel's title refers to an international record book for mandrills dealing with births, couplings and deaths. Ironically, Sarah and her less than macho husband, Ben, who works in mortgage financing and has been known to sit to pee, have been through three failed pregnancies by the first chapter, with more failures likely to come. Even if Sarah's desire to have a baby is mostly an animal need to procreate, she can't help feeling jealous of her best friend, Georgie, who has recently had a baby by C-section. But Georgie, who overcame her hard-core childhood to become a literary professor, is a mess--afraid to put the baby down and taking pain pills--while her husband escapes with increasing frequency to the local bar, where he plays a macabre drinking game, taking a shot every time a dead girl shows up on the TV screen. Sara and Georgie's slightly older, widowed friend Nyla is a cartoonishly idealistic yoga instructor and environmentalist who has raised two daughters alone. While the older girl is successfully off to college (Brown no less), Nyla remains willfully oblivious about her younger daughter's typical but dangerous adolescent crises. Nyla is also happily pregnant without a partner. Then there's Dulcet, who has zero interest in babies and works in an anatomically correct body suit to teach sex ed when she's not having casual sex with strangers. All the friends grew up in pre-hipster Portland, and the portrait of the city in its evolution sometimes outshines the lives of these unhappy, increasingly annoying characters. Often sharply observed, at its best this is a comedy of manners among a very distinct subset--the not quite successful but intellectually self-superior--so the tragic and uplifting elements bunched together in the last chapters seem to come out of left field.

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April 1, 2013
Sarah, a behaviorist at the local zoo, turns her studies to the human population when infertility keeps her from reaching her life's goal of becoming a mother. Dulcet, a single and fiercely independent nonconformist, introduces sex ed to high-school students when she isn't otherwise focused on getting high. Georgie, a brand-new mom, struggles to meld the roles of professional, mother, and wife into a life that will be both pleasing and productive. Nyla, a self-proclaimed ecologist, strives to save the world and her teenage daughter at the same time. As these four friends come in and out of each other's lives, negotiating their individual worlds of love, family, and work, Drake teases out the intersection between theories on parenthood, evolution, sex, and reproduction. The result is a relevant and original story about life and self-worth in an increasingly crowded world. Although the characters are whiny and self-absorbed at times, and their stories seem connected almost by afterthought, Drake's sharp wit and contemporary take on ecology and adult life make this an entertaining and thought-provoking read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)