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A review by jenna_x_w
Bad Animals by Sarah Braunstein
3.0
This book seems to be concerned with points of view and the way we tell stories ABOUT ourselves and others TO ourselves and others.
I was pretty engrossed at the beginning, when Maeve, a Maine paraprofessional librarian who seems also to be dealing with midlife crisis and empty nest syndrome, experiences several difficult events at work as a result of budget issues as well as a supposedly false accusation by Libby, a supposedly troubled teen library user.
Maeve catastrophizes about all of this and proceeds to have a low key mental breakdown, which collides uncomfortably with the arrival onto the scene of Harrison Riddles, a successful author who is kind of like a suave litfic Brooklynite playboy version of Stephen King and to whom Maeve has been writing fangirl letters for some time begging him to visit the library and also to intervene on her behalf regarding her Troubles there. Turns out Riddles is more interested in writing about/appropriating the life of Sudanese refugee Willie, who once was another library teen patron but now is a young adult marrying Maeve’s hipster librarian colleague. Amidst all this, Maeve’s young adult daughter Paige is trotting the globe in pursuit of a horticulture/botany career and also left a bunch of mysterious plants behind in Maeve’s dubious care, and did I mention that Maeve is also married to a kindly and responsible if sort of dull accountant who is largely absentee attending to work and family business?
This is all interesting enough setup, and there are even more miscellaneous details woven in, but for me it never felt cohesive or realistic. I had trouble connecting with the story and especially the characters and all of these challenges to my empathy and attention just worsened for me as I went along. I ultimately decided that the book only makes sense and is appealing to me if Maeve dreamed or hallucinated or made up the whole thing, which I do not believe is the author’s intention at all, but that is the point of view I am choosing to take and the story I’m deciding to tell myself about this novel and my experience reading it.
This is one of those books I’m okay with just not being smart enough to appreciate. And I honestly just wanted way more Libby and to hear her side and story, if anything.
I was pretty engrossed at the beginning, when Maeve, a Maine paraprofessional librarian who seems also to be dealing with midlife crisis and empty nest syndrome, experiences several difficult events at work as a result of budget issues as well as a supposedly false accusation by Libby, a supposedly troubled teen library user.
Maeve catastrophizes about all of this and proceeds to have a low key mental breakdown, which collides uncomfortably with the arrival onto the scene of Harrison Riddles, a successful author who is kind of like a suave litfic Brooklynite playboy version of Stephen King and to whom Maeve has been writing fangirl letters for some time begging him to visit the library and also to intervene on her behalf regarding her Troubles there. Turns out Riddles is more interested in writing about/appropriating the life of Sudanese refugee Willie, who once was another library teen patron but now is a young adult marrying Maeve’s hipster librarian colleague. Amidst all this, Maeve’s young adult daughter Paige is trotting the globe in pursuit of a horticulture/botany career and also left a bunch of mysterious plants behind in Maeve’s dubious care, and did I mention that Maeve is also married to a kindly and responsible if sort of dull accountant who is largely absentee attending to work and family business?
This is all interesting enough setup, and there are even more miscellaneous details woven in, but for me it never felt cohesive or realistic. I had trouble connecting with the story and especially the characters and all of these challenges to my empathy and attention just worsened for me as I went along. I ultimately decided that the book only makes sense and is appealing to me if Maeve dreamed or hallucinated or made up the whole thing, which I do not believe is the author’s intention at all, but that is the point of view I am choosing to take and the story I’m deciding to tell myself about this novel and my experience reading it.
This is one of those books I’m okay with just not being smart enough to appreciate. And I honestly just wanted way more Libby and to hear her side and story, if anything.