Monica Drake has written a take-your-breath-away good, blow-your-mind wise, crack-your-heart-open beauty of a novel. The Stud Book is a smart, sexy, comic, compassionate, absorbing, and necessary story of our times.” —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things
“The Stud Book is a dreamy, druggy, sexy concoction—no surprise coming from the author of Clown Girl. I was instantly consumed by its evocative exploration of motherhood in the Pacific Northwest. Monica Drake's vision of the world is like no other.” —Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins and The Melting Season
“Hilarious, heart-wrenching, and stylistically brilliant, The Stud Book is about who we are and why we matter—about our stubborn, beautiful drive to make life, love, a world inhabitable for those who come after us. If women carry whole worlds into unknown futures, Monica Drake is the mapmaker of the human condition.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Dora: A Headcase
“Monica Drake is one of the smartest, funniest writers working today and The Stud Book moves from farce to satire to tender melodrama without missing a beat.”
—Chelsea Cain, author of the Archie Sheridan/Gretchen Lowell series
“What's to say? Laughter is the highest praise, and Monica Drake makes me laugh. The Stud Book is so funny it could make a dog laugh.” —Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club
“Monica Drake takes a scalpel eye and an acid wit to the hearts and flowers of motherhood. What’s left when she’s done is a portrait of desire and danger and need and greed. Very funny, very bright, very unsafe.” —Kevin Canty, author of Everything and A Stranger in This World
“Like a mandrill's florid display, The Stud Book is Monica Drake's vivid show of talent, verve and attraction. You will fall in love with her characters as they fight against the enclosures—or are they cages?—of adulthood and parenthood, before ultimately learning to live in blessed, but now unbowed, captivity.” —Karl Taro Greenfeld, author of Triburbia
“What really stands out is her depiction of [the] city. This is not the twee wonderland of Portlandia...Drake combines [her characters’] lives in a quirky, knowing way, showing the complexities of modern-day female life, species Pacific Northwest native.” —Publishers Weekly
“The Stud Book is a wild ride full of dark humor...Drake reminds us that we aren’t so different from our animal ancestors: Many of our desires are, and have always been, primal. What we choose to do with these desires, well, that’s what makes us human.” —Book Page
“Drake teases out the intersection between theories on parenthood, evolution, sex, and reproduction. The result is a relevant and original story about life and selfworth in an increasingly crowded world....Drake’s sharp wit and contemporary take on ecology and adult life make this an entertaining and thought-provoking read.” —Booklist
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.
