Book Review 01: Animal by Lisa Taddeo
“It was my father who had driven my mother mad. But once again, mad is not right. The world had set me up to believe that it was women who went mad. But it was simply women’s pain that manifested as madness.”
Reading this book was like an un-amusement park ride of which you could not unstrap from or back out of before it wrecked, the chaos had already ensued as soon as you’d read the first page. Animal, aptly named, immerses the audience in the world of Joan, a depraved world of the casually cruel - though a learned cruelty. She asks us to recognize the bonechillingly murderous power dynamics that can ensue between men and women, for better or for worse. Animal is a chaotic, visceral, sobering story of abuse, trauma, and infidelity.
I will not be the first to warn of potentially triggering instances throughout this book pertaining to emotional and physical abuse, pedophilia, miscarriage, s*xual assault, r*pe, and murder.
Joan’s voice is similar in her blunt and crude ways to that of the main character of Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts, if you’ve read other novels with erotically edgy and damaged young women as first person narrators (I, myself, need a break after this one). Her narration is at times unreliable, and almost always untoward. One of my criticisms of this story is that her commentary goes from sensationalistic “I’m not like other girls” remarks for audience retention in the beginning, to a more mature and developed voice by the second third of the novel, which was a welcomed relief.
On the whole, Animal unforgivingly criticizes unfit parenting, adulterous men, and the detrimental effects of misogyny and the male gaze from the most youthful, fragile age of girlhood, internalized and not. It also explores the power dynamics of sex through the lense of age gap relationships, the objectification and commodification of the female body, and the gendered side effects of marriages rotting from the inside out. It unrelentingly shakes the audience and asks over and over, with who does the true power lie? And then it writes out the answer in blood.
“Part of my child brain hated her because she wasn’t young enough or even beautiful enough. Because she wasn’t strong enough. Or because she was too strong. Because she was so complex where my father was not. I hated my mother, in short, for being a woman.”
I rated Lisa Taddeo’s Animal a five out of five stars. I have added her other popular work, Three Women, to my TBR list as well. I will also say that the Audible reading by Emma Roberts was very well narrated and easy to listen to if you choose that medium!
Let me know if you’ve read either of these novels in the comments or maybe recommend something a bit lighter for my now unsettled brain, which is hiding in a corner of my skull from the metaphorical coyote this book became.
