One evening a man walks into a restaurant and, in an act of facile dominance, takes his own life in front of Joan, putting her on a collision course with her past.

Trauma has a way of getting under your skin and puppeteering you. Sometimes you’re aware of it, sometimes you aren’t. As Joan tunnels to a new location even as she dredges up her past in the narrative, “Who is this for” is a nagging question that creates a wonderful narrative tension.

It also manages to craft a really compelling voice for Joan in, something like a co-opting of the detective genre. Towing a melodramatic tone with the deathly serious traumatic aspects and, really, the honing in on the darkest parts of self that Joan is able to read, the prose are incandescent to me. There’s a real penchant for description and a willingness to allow the reader to understand Joan to her core. Unconventional and macabre though she may be, I find her to be brilliantly rendered, as is the world. And the cadence and diction of it makes the innocuous interesting.

Which it has to, since the present day plot is essentially entirely conflated with the past. As we learn the origin of Joan as she is today, the journey inward is taking place in physical space. Time is moving linearly, but ultimately, Joan understands at an instinctual level that to deal with death, for her, means a regression of self. Every step forward is a step backward. It’s survival.

This makes the flow compelling but choppy. When Joan is stymied, the story of the past does too, hindering the pacing somewhat. It also, in a weird way, feels right for the character though. Especially when things come to a head and all is revealed.

As a sum of its parts, Animal has a lot of interesting things to say about women and the impact of childhood socialization intersecting with trauma. But also the way in which patriarchy makes it so difficult to form positive female bonds that center them, rather than the men in their lives. The generational impact of this is particularly effective in the novel, essentially putting every gender role present in the novel on an inevitable and escapable trajectory, but creating a subjective space of interpretation for the reader to wonder if, with the unhinged nature of Joan manifesting, she has broken free of her trajectory, or merely fully manifested it.