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A review by yesbethhh92
Animal by Lisa Taddeo
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
“All my life, all the men taking what they wanted and leaving when it was over.”
Wow wow wow. This was incredible.
In Animal, Joan flees New York after witnessing a horrible act of violence. From there we follow her to Los Angeles, where she seeks out a woman named Alice for reasons that are slowly uncovered.
Joan reflects back on her life since childhood, recalling her relationship with her parents and a traumatic experience that affected the rest of her life and dictated all her future relationships with women and men.
This book is about the entitlement, cruelty and entitlement of men, and how this manifests in women as pain, rage and madness.
I could feel the primal rage growing in me as I read this book, and the tension kept building to an emotional and devastating end.
Lisa Taddeo is a master with words, and I love the way she created parallels between the stories of the different characters.
I loved this so so so much. I wasn’t sure about it early on, and took some breaks from it because it’s quite slow in the earlier chapters. But once it gets going, it really gets going, and by the end I was crying.
I highly recommend this but check trigger warnings first as there as some graphic parts.
“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. It was simply women's pain that manifested as madness.”
Wow wow wow. This was incredible.
In Animal, Joan flees New York after witnessing a horrible act of violence. From there we follow her to Los Angeles, where she seeks out a woman named Alice for reasons that are slowly uncovered.
Joan reflects back on her life since childhood, recalling her relationship with her parents and a traumatic experience that affected the rest of her life and dictated all her future relationships with women and men.
This book is about the entitlement, cruelty and entitlement of men, and how this manifests in women as pain, rage and madness.
I could feel the primal rage growing in me as I read this book, and the tension kept building to an emotional and devastating end.
Lisa Taddeo is a master with words, and I love the way she created parallels between the stories of the different characters.
I loved this so so so much. I wasn’t sure about it early on, and took some breaks from it because it’s quite slow in the earlier chapters. But once it gets going, it really gets going, and by the end I was crying.
I highly recommend this but check trigger warnings first as there as some graphic parts.
“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. It was simply women's pain that manifested as madness.”
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Miscarriage, Misogyny, Pedophilia, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Suicide, Death of parent, and Murder