15. straydog

By Kathe Koja

Last summer, we were going to meet friends for dinner on Main St. and made a point of stopping by Pulp Fiction about an hour earlier to browse a bit.  Olman, unsurprisingly, found a small stack of paperbacks.  The owner was there and I overheard Olman asking him if he happened to have anything by so-and-so, etc.  At some point, I'd been browsing their new books section, and thought I’d inquire if he had anything by Kathe Koja.  He immediately replied with “Oh, I know I don’t have anything by her and probably won’t ever” implying along the lines that she’s been long out of print and her books are hard to find. 

 

His know-it-all, somewhat dismissive tone did not inspire me to argue with him, yet I knew there have been at least one recent reissue of her work, namely her most well-known novel, The Cipher, which was how I became interested in her in the first place. A simple google search also revealed that Skin had been reprinted in early 2025 by the same Meerkat Press who had released the 2020 reissue of The Cipher. If the owner had been doing his job properly, he would have had copies of Skin and The Cipher in the new section!  Even the Pulp Fiction homepage proclaims:

While our corporate competitors "diversify" away from print into bath towels, candles, chocolates & blankets, we're sticking with what we do best: an unrivalled selection of new, used, & out-of-print books chosen by readers, not algorithms. 

What’s more, I found out later that several paperback editions by Koja are available at corporate candle-and-chocolate seller Indigo Books, so what gives, other than the fact that the Pulp Fiction guy was an ignorant idiot!  Which brings me to Straydog (2002). I was looking at ordering the Graphic Novel Builder  via my neighbourhood bookstore for my daughter’s upcoming birthday, but that's when I discovered Straydog was at Indigo and because D&Q didn’t have Straydog, I ended up ordering both books from Indigo.  TBH, Koya’s oeuvre is a little too out there for me, but I would probably read Skin. Straydog appealed to me more because it was marketed as a young adult novel. 

 

A high school outcast, Rachel, volunteers part-time at an animal shelter after school. She develops a bond with a feral collie that was recently brought into the shelter. While writing a short story to submit to a competition, she begins to identify with the dog to an almost hyper-obsessive degree. 

Koja has a cult following primarily due to her uncanny ability to portray the outcast in society -- warts and all. Anyone who’s ever been in the fringes throughout high school would identify with Rachel's internal monologue, her harsh assessment of the popular kids, her unspoken longing to belong somewhere and her fear of connection because it’s just so damn strange and unfamiliar.  I believe I would have identified with Rachel had I read this in my early teens.

 

Straydog explores adolescent coming of age in a way few YA books have, then and now. It’s very realistic, and not always pleasant to read.  Even though it features a kind of meet-cute with a fellow outsider and new boy, Griffin, Rachel ends up sabotaging their budding relationship as well as her volunteer job because she’s a flawed, complicate and very emotional teenager.

 

I’d be interested in what my soon-to-be 13yo daughter would think of straydog (note to self: I have put the little paperback in her bookshelf).  She may find it a bit ordinary and too real at this stage in her life, but maybe this is something she'd appreciate more in a year or so...