Unlikely Animals

November 1, 2021

After debuting with the winsome, multi-best-booked Rabbit Cake, Hartnett returns with the story of med school dropout Emma Starling, who has returned home to Everton, NH, to care for her ailing father. In the throes of an unnamed and mysterious neurological disease, Clive Starling sees small creatures that aren't there and heeds the ghost of a naturalist who welcomed wild animals into his home. More persuasively--and more disturbingly--he believes that Emma's missing former best friend is still alive, and Emma goes in search of her.

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February 14, 2022
Hartnett (Rabbit Cake) delivers a quirky ghost story set in present-day Upper Valley, N.H., inspired by the legacy of naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes. Emma Starling, 22, drops out of medical school to help care for her father, Clive, who is suffering from a rare brain disease. Clive was forced to retire from his professorship due to his hallucinations of animals and is now obsessed with finding Emma’s high school best friend Crystal Nash, who has been missing for several months. When Emma becomes a substitute teacher for fifth graders, she’s drawn back into all the drama of her hometown, including her brother Auggie’s opioid addiction and her mother Ingrid’s unhappiness. With the police unconcerned over Crystal’s disappearance, Emma decides to work with Clive to solve the mystery. The ghosts of various dead townspeople weigh in throughout, such as “real-life Doctor Doolittle” Baynes, whom Clive reveres and who now tells Clive what to do. Others lend an amusing point of view to the proceedings (“one of the perks of being dead, omniscience within town limits,” one of them says). While the jarring ending is hard to swallow, Hartnett’s clever prose and brisk pacing will carry readers through. Hartnett’s whimsical storytelling casts a spell. Agent: Katie Grimm, Don Congdon Assoc.

March 1, 2022
An absurdist, laugh-out-loud family drama about intergenerational healing. Never a truer word was spoken than when the ghostly inhabitants of the Maple Street cemetery in Everton, New Hampshire, who are the choruslike narrators of this novel, rationalize that "a good story doesn't always follow an arrow." In what begins as a slow-paced, meandering tale, Emma Starling, a natural healer and former golden girl of small-town Everton, drops out of medical school and moves back in with her parents. Her father, Clive, who's dying from a mysterious brain disease, is having hallucinations of animals while being haunted by the ghost of (real-life) local naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes. When Emma assumes legal guardianship over her rapidly deteriorating father, the two become embroiled in his dementia-induced obsession: a seemingly hopeless search for Emma's childhood best friend, Crystal, a heroin addict who has been missing for almost six months. The first quarter of the book seems like a mess of disparate parts: What does the ghost of New Hampshire's own Dr. Doolittle have to do with the opioid crisis, boomerang children, saintly healing powers, or a Westworld-esque hunting preserve for millionaires? But the reader's patience is rewarded as Hartnett skillfully draws the string. This tragicomedy delivers as Clive takes a stab at adult parenting before dying and Emma navigates layers of ambiguous loss. Some plot twists feel a little more forced than others. However, the overall message--that any life lived, even just a few extra months of it, is a miracle rife with potential--is a balm for our challenging times. An anthem for the boomerang generation.

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February 1, 2022

In this engaging work of magic realism from Hartnett (Rabbit Cake), readers are introduced to the deceased residents of Everton, NH, before they meet the living. The spirits of Maple Street Cemetery recall the birth of Emma, a child born with the ability to heal. Her parents want her to have a typical childhood, so Emma never develops her gift (other than a teenage turn as a healer for hire), but she heads to medical school, thinking it is her calling--until it isn't. Emma moves to California to leave behind her brother's addiction, her father Clive's infidelity, and prying small-town eyes. Now her father is dying of a strange brain illness that produces animal visions, and she's returned home. Everton is a mysterious place, with a gated wildlife reserve community most residents have never entered, a possible local drug ring, the unexplained death of a young girl, and Clive's obsession--the disappearance of Emma's best friend Crystal. Much unfolds here as Emma settles in and starts a job as a teacher. VERDICT Embracing the undercurrent of fantasy in Everton, readers will contemplate how easy it is to write someone off as unredeemable or unhinged when maybe their brain works in a way most do not understand.--Shaunna E. Hunter

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2022
When Emma Starling returns to Everton, New Hampshire after four years away in order to help her ailing father, she isn't the successful young healer everyone believed she would be. Instead, she feels lost at home, with an eccentric father who sees hallucinations of animals and the ghost of naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes, a brother overcoming his drug addiction, and a controlling mother trying to hold the family together. Emma hopes to find some direction in her life and get out of town. But when she learns her former best friend has been missing and only Emma's father is continuing the search, she slowly realizes how much she took her community for granted. She stumbles upon a substitute-teaching job for a fifth-grade class traumatized by losses resulting from the opioid crisis. The longer Emma stays in Everton, the more she must confront her past before, unexpectedly, embarking on a healing journey of her own. As in her debut, Rabbit Cake (2017), Hartnett masterfully balances a story of deep loss with the perfect amount of hilarity and tenderness. Unlikely Animals explores complex family dynamics and the growth that can occur after tragedy, with just a little help.

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