Annie Hartnett

At the time Emma Starling was born, the midwife noted that she had a natural gift of healing. And while it wasn’t strong when she was a child, her family forbade her to use it until she was of age. Emma, bright, beautiful at the top of her high school class, determined to go to med school and was accepted, but never attended.

Instead she returned home, feeling foolish and also without her healing power.

She found her father Clive was in the throes of a brain ailment. He had been fired from his professorship after making a scene about invisible cats in his classroom. He’s slowly been ousted from the band he loves and common tasks are becoming problematic. He spends his days in the company of the ghost of local naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes. Baynes, during his lifetime established a huge local wildlife preserve, filled with all manners of exotic beasts and extant to this day,. Clive also spends his days papering and repapering the town with missing posters for Emma’s vanished high school best friend.

Emma’s brother had a high school sports injury and is now a recovering addict. Drugs are a major problem in the town. The police believe that Emma’s missing friend is one more victim of the epidemic.

Emma takes over the guardianship of her father, and also assumes a job as the semipermanent substitute teacher for a class of problematic kids whose former teacher is also mixed up with the town’s drug problem.

In the background there is a chorus of ghosts, sitting on their tombstones, much like the graveyard in Our Town and commenting on the happenings of the town.

There is a lot going on in this novel – family expectations, ghosts, ghost animals, miraculous healings (this thread just frittered out - why?), the drug epidemic, caring for loved ones with dementia and young women going missing. Perhaps there were too many elements for me as I just never quite became invested in the many threads of the story, although I did like the upbeat ending.

One sentence review: [Demon Copperhead] meets [[Our Town]] along with historical photographs of the real naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes.… (mere)

This is a very quirky novel featuring a Greek chorus based in a small New Hampshire graveyard, in the manner of Our Town. Within the town boundaries of fictional Everton is a real wild game park patronized only by the wealthiest citizens and mostly ignored by the locals, who have no access but must be wary of the occasional wild boar invading their gardens. Home from a non-starter stint at medical school in California, morose Emma slinks home to find her father Clive in the throes of memory loss, her mother Ingrid moving out of their home to cohabitate with the local doctor, and her brother Auggie recovering from his heroin addiction. Emma's best friend Crystal has disappeared, and Clive is obsessed with finding her. Emma becomes a substitute teacher and is invigorated by her fifth grade students, who are still suffering from the jailing of their teacher for drug distribution. Those who are buried in the local cemetery observe and comment on the goings-on (but not those who had been cremated - their consciousness is too dispersed). The nature and necessity of best friendhood is a major theme, and there's much gentle humor here as well as some true facts.… (mere)

Oh man, I'm incredibly disappointed this didn't work for me. I've heard nothing but amazing things about it, and I dove in with very high hopes.

I'd anticipated "Unlikely Animals" would break me out of my current reading slump, but it wasn't meant to be. There was nothing wrong with the book, as such... it just didn't grip me. I read and read, and thought, "meh, I don't really care about any of it."

I was also confused several times and had to go back and re-read passages. Finally, I can't say I was terribly keen on the ghosts-as-narrators thing.

I won't be returning to this one.… (mere)