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3.96 AVERAGE
3.96 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
made me cry sob. probably will reread one million times
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I should have enjoyed this. Alienated woman gets pregnant by lesbian owl lover and struggles with a half-owl child. Writing was not very good, I love surrealism, but the writing was overly lyrical first person present tense with so many descriptions of “x was y coloured” or variations of. Felt like it needed further editing, though some sentences were cutting and I could relate to a lot of the feelings expressed here it just was overly long and not to my taste.
a beautifully dark, stinking, feral fairytale about the brutality of motherhood and raising a child who is an owl.
I felt that the novel's metaphor - chouette being a neurodivergent and differently abled child - was pretty on the nose, but nonetheless was hooked on the author's viscerally descriptive prose and felt like I also wanted to return to my animal self and run away to live in the gloaming with the bird of the wood.
I felt that the novel's metaphor - chouette being a neurodivergent and differently abled child - was pretty on the nose, but nonetheless was hooked on the author's viscerally descriptive prose and felt like I also wanted to return to my animal self and run away to live in the gloaming with the bird of the wood.
dark
emotional
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
reflective
Going to be thinking about this one for a long time. Such a strange and feral and guttural book. Less a review and more a place to put my thoughts.
Metaphor? Magical realism? A person having a mental break with reality?
No one really has a name here. ‘The youngest son’, ‘the husband’, ‘the aborter’. Even ‘Tiny’ may not actually be a name, but a descriptor that the narrator puts on herself or that others put on her. Chouette? Again could be a descriptor for her ‘little owl baby’. And Charlotte, too, could be a real name or a bastardization of Chouette. Tiny never corrects the husband in saying ‘Charlotte’.
Who is the owl lover? I think The Aborter/Secret Lover represents those who call disabled people parents of disabled people ‘heroes’ or ‘warriors’. It’s the act of slipping into self congratulation for just being a decent human. Or simply being human. I have not had any relatable experiences to this, but can imagine it/have seen it in others.
Love this quote from The Guardian’s Rhiannon Lucy Cosslet: “Really, Chouette is a sublime parable of mother-love which ferociously eviscerates society’s failure to accept nonconformity.”
The husband: obviously reprehensible. Represents patriarchy, status quo, “normalcy”, abuse, control, power.
The end: Chouette learns to push against her father (she eats his eye) and Tiny ends up leaving him. Is leaving him like killing him? Is there joy in that death (his and her former life, her former controller), there is joy in MIL’s quick death. The very end: her baby grows up quickly, seemingly far too soon, and literally becomes larger than life and then just disappears. Tiny feels that loss: grief, rage, hatred, then the nothingness of a bottomless pit. She lost herself while fighting for and caring for her child. What to do now? Who is she now?
Metaphor? Magical realism? A person having a mental break with reality?
