Reviews - Gay the Pray Away

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919 reviews for:

Gay the Pray Away

Natalie Naudus

4.32 AVERAGE

the_bookish_chimera's review against another edition

5.0

challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: N/A

“I see the word bisexual. I have never, never seen this world before, and the room is spinning with the importance of it.”

This book… this book gave me all the feels, honestly.
Valerie is such a great character, and she walks along such a long path during the story.. From the guilt of not being able to fit in the frame decided for her, from the frustration of not being considered like her brother, she gains more and more confidence, asserts herself as she discovers what the world has to give and impose –to herself first– who she wants to be. Her love story with Riley acts like another trigger, maintains her quest of freedom, but I absolutely ADORED that the spark that pushed her to go after her already here questioning first came from a book, and from the joy and the validation she felt while reading (I can relate to that SO MUCH).
The religious parts had me shiver, but in another kind of way. This was so intense that I sometimes had to put the book down for a moment, just to catch my breath.
After the dread and the tension, closing this book is just like going out in the garden during spring, just after a shower. Valerie’s awakening was beautiful, like the taste of grapefruits, like onions in ramen, like honeysuckle’s sent, like words and sketches scribbled in the margins of a book, like hope under the rainbow.
As a fort-ish YO person, I wish I had such books as a teen (even though I come from an atheist and open family, but which doesn’t mean non-ignorant) and I’m delighted –and so, so grateful– to have the opportunity to read them now, especially the YA ones. I truly hope this book will find the hands of the person(s) who will need this story to grow, to hope, to shine.

Thank you to the author and Quick Books for this wonderful eARC on NetGalley. My opinions are my own.

xoxo_jasmyn's review

5.0

emotional hopeful inspiring medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

sampetsdogs's review

4.5

dark emotional hopeful reflective sad fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

olivedean's review

4.0

A kick in the religious trauma (in a good way).

alishaw1's review against another edition

2.0

I really wanted this to be awesome! The plot lagged for 50% of the book, with most of the climactic action happening in the last 10%. The happy-ish ending felt a bit forced. Lots of reflection on high control religion and young queer identity formation, but unfortunately I was pretty bored for lots of this book. That said, this is a great resource for folks/queer kids in an earlier part of their deconstruction journey!