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Library | Material Type | Item Barcode | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... Anderson - Anderson Main Library | Book | 28085884 | F YODER RACHEL | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Anderson - Belton Branch | Book | 22960002197993 | F YODER RACHEL | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Beaufort - Hilton Head Branch | Book | 0530011298706 | FIC YOD | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Dorchester - Summerville Branch | Book | 30018006224170 | FIC YOD | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Kershaw - Camden Library | Book | 33255003733624 | YODER | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
In this blazingly smart and voracious debut novel, an artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced she's turning into a dog. * "A must-read for anyone who can't get enough of the ever-blurring line between the psychological and supernatural that Yellowjackets exemplifies." -- Vulture
One day, the mother was a mother, but then one night, she was quite suddenly something else...
An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, casually dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms.
As the mother's symptoms intensify, and her temptation to give in to her new dog impulses peak, she struggles to keep her alter-canine-identity secret. Seeking a cure at the library, she discovers the mysterious academic tome which becomes her bible, A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography , and meets a group of mommies involved in a multilevel-marketing scheme who may also be more than what they seem.
An outrageously original novel of ideas about art, power, and womanhood wrapped in a satirical fairy tale, Nightbitch will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. And you should. You should howl as much as you want.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Yoder's guttural and luminous debut blends absurdism, humor, and myth to lay bare the feral, violent realities underlying a new mother's existence. An unnamed stay-at-home mother lives through a monotonous routine with her two-year-old son, while her kind yet mostly uninterested husband leaves for weeklong work trips each Monday. Things begin to change when the mother notices a patch of hair growing on the back of her neck; spots her new, curiously sharp canines in the mirror; and begins to feel a tail emerging from her lower back. Bewildered by her metamorphosis, the mother searches online for explanations with terms such as "looks like I was punched hard in both eyes." Horrified by the dizzying results, she treks to the library, a zone that promises the comfort of knowledge but is colonized by other mothers ("She actively resisted making friends in a mom context and objected to the sort of clapping and cooing that went on in the library room... the happiness and positivity that would also be mandatory," Yoder writes). She checks out a book titled A Field Guide to Magical Women, which validates her experience and encourages her to embrace the freedom of her new animal nature. Bursting with fury, loneliness, and vulgarity, Yoder's narrative revels in its deconstruction of the social script women and mothers are taught to follow, painstakingly reading between the lines to expose the cruel and downright ludicrous ways in which women are denied their personhood. An electric work by an ingenious new voice, this is one to devour. Agent: Monika Woods, Triangle House. (July)
Guardian Review
In the opening pages of Rachel Yoder's debut novel, an anonymous middle-class mother in an anonymous American town finds a patch of coarse hair on the nape of her neck. She examines her teeth and finds them sharper, more pointed. A lump is growing at the base of her spine, like a vestigial tail. She does what we would all do - she googles. "[She] searched humans with dog teeth on her phone, searched do humans and dogs share a common ancestor, searched human animal hybrid and recessive animal genes in humans and research human animal genes legacy history ¿ and then, because she wanted to, searched rest cures and 'The Yellow Wallpaper', which she had once read in college, then stared blankly for a while at nothing in particular while sitting on the toilet, then stopped searching altogether." This mother, who is stuck at home with her hyperactive two-year-old son, flush with resentment at her largely absent husband, feels herself changing. Not just on the outside, but inside, too. While her eyebrows caterpillar across her brow and hair sprouts on the tops of her feet, a feral impulsivity growls inside her: "She wasn't turning into a dog ¿ she could not let herself imagine such fanciful things, and didn't, except at night, once the boy was asleep, when she sat, panting, at the window, staring into the open dark night." As her frustration with the inertia of bourgeois domesticity grows, the allure of the primal becomes stronger. The quotidian irritations of her cossetted life drive her to acts of unrestrained violence. She longs for the savour of raw meat. She becomes Nightbitch. How, and why, and exactly what Nightbitch is, is never fully explained, and doesn't need to be, but she finds succour in a book at her local library titled A Field Guide to Magical Women, which paraphrases the novel's central themes: "To what identities do women turn when those available to them fail? How do women expand their identities to encompass all parts of their beings?" There has been something of a resurgence in stories of feminine monstrousness - see Julia Armfield's salt slow, Camilla Grudova's The Doll's Alphabet, or Daisy Johnson's Fen - but Yoder's take feels very fresh, even mischievous in its handling of the metamorphic trope. She ironises the ponderous trappings of the gothic with a chatty, insubstantial tone, employing lots of exclamation marks and other deceptively corny affectations. It all helps to build a disconcerting intimacy with her pseudo-canine protagonist. We follow Nightbitch as she stalks by shimmering hosta leaves, through the gardens of sprawling McMansions and under the strip lights of mega malls, all brightly evoked in Yoder's exuberant, velvety prose. The mounting incongruity between Nightbitch's profane interiority and this sanitised, suburban mise en scène yields some of the novel's funniest scenes. "Voracious with death, she and the boy descended midday on their favourite lunch place downtown, just across from the library," where Nightbitch buries her face in a plate of macaroni as though it were the viscera of a rabbit, to the horror of neighbouring diners. Not all of the humour worked for me. Some of the jokes - and I am fully aware I am saying this in the context of a review of a book in which a woman turns into a dog - strained credulity. A fellow mother names her daughter Aubergine, "eggplant but French" - really? Likewise, Nightbitch's husband's comic obliviousness to her condition edges, at times, into the cartoonish. Yoder's humour may sometimes miss the mark, but her commentary on the assorted neuroses of modern womanhood is graceful and coolly incisive. Standing in her kitchen at dusk, surveying the havoc wrought by her toddler, Nightbitch feels "she could almost touch her loneliness, like a second child". Once again consulting the internet for answers, she reflects on the condition of her equally lonely, equally afflicted peers: "Sick women with no discernible diagnosis, pains and bruises and aches and anxieties without cause ¿ who were consumed by their bodies and, at a loss for someone to turn to, turned to each other, each one staring into her own white square of light." Where Yoder's novel felt most original to me was in this harnessing of the familiar tropes of individual transfiguration to a broader social critique. The novel's premise reads like the literal embodiment of an expensive residential workshop Gwyneth Paltrow might endorse: centre the spirit through dog-play. Find your inner wolf mother. The sensational nature of the Nightbitch's metamorphosis reveals, by contrast, the paucity of what capitalism offers moneyed western women, torn between the conflicting demands of work and family: herbal remedies in bijou packaging, a new pair of leather boots. "Oh my God!" exclaims another mother, when the Nightbitch arrives - grizzled and shaggy, in a torn kaftan, her hair unwashed for a week, because she is turning into a dog - at a local toddlers' group. "You are so boho! I love what you've done with yourself." Despite these satirical undertones, there is a pleasing generosity about this debut. Nightbitch's premise may not be radically original, and neither is its denouement - but Yoder's peculiar wit infuses new life into the cold, furry flesh of the monstrous femme.
Kirkus Review
A new mother who fears she's going through a frightening and exhilarating transformation leans into the feral side of motherhood. In this myth-steeped debut, an unnamed artist and mother, not having had a solid night's sleep since her son was born more than two years earlier, has begun waking enraged in the night. Her oblivious tech-bro husband travels for work, "rendering her a de-facto single mom" while he enjoys nightly room service, abundant quiet, and a bed to himself, and she tries to adjust to life at home with their child after having made the ambivalent decision to leave her "dream job" as director of a community gallery. In the wake of creating another human with her body (not to mention sleep deprivation and lack of child care), her impulse to create in other ways has been quashed, her mind wiped clean of ideas as she watches grad school friends, who have both children and the necessary support to advance their careers, ascend, with write-ups in the Times, biennials, residencies, and guest teaching invitations. When she confesses to her husband that she thinks she may be turning into a dog, he laughs off her concerns about the changes she's experiencing--coarse hair sprouting from the back of her neck, lengthening canines, a pilonidal cyst that suspiciously resembles a tail. She self-deprecatingly calls herself "Nightbitch," which plants the germ for a new self she incrementally invents and increasingly embodies, with considerable help from a mysterious library book called A Field Guide to Magical Women. Though at points this novel can read as if ticking boxes from a list of notes cribbed from an internet moms' group, it remains a darkly funny, often insightful dive into the competitive relationship and mutually generative potential between art and motherhood and the animalism underlying procreation and child-rearing. It is both a lament for and, at times, a satire of discontented, primarily White, heterosexual cis women who, without sufficient familial or community support, seek out often toxic and sometimes predatory online communities, where their propensities for a certain kind of American middle-class girl-boss elitism are honed toward "mom shaming" and multilevel marketing scams. Disconnected from family and without a strong sense of cultural belonging, even when Nightbitch seeks to create something truly original, like the MLM moms slinging leggings with appropriated patterns, she also colonizes, longing for and profiting from "the things [she] never had." A battle hymn as novel about sinking your teeth into the available options for self-determination and ripping them to shreds. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Is the mother growing more hair, sharper canines, a tail? She thinks so, but her husband laughs off her concerns. Home with her toddler son while her husband travels for work every week, the mother is dealing with a certain kind of despair. She laments the dream job she gave up to be a full-time parent, and the art she misses making. This maybe-turning-into-a-dog thing adds curious flavor to the monotony, though, and leads her to her comforting new library-found companions, the wild and true stories in The Field Guide to Magical Women. And her son loves their new game, playing dog, lessening the mother's despair despite feared judgment from playground mommies and her husband. After a night of bounding and sniffing through her small town on four legs, she wakes up as her woman-self, now called Nightbitch. Yoder's first novel finds catharsis in pushing reality to its fantastic limits. The mother/Nightbitch is sublimely quotable as she skewers society's devaluation of caretaking work and realizes that her art and her life could be the same thing.