Reviewed by Jennifer Kurdyla

Chouette
by Claire Oshetsky
Ecco Press, 256pp., $13.29
HR

If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then Claire Oshetsky’s delightfully disturbing novel, Chouette, offers a nonplanetary paradigm through which to view the female experience: the bestial. Equal parts magical realist and radical feminist, the novel follows the plight of Tiny, a woman whose journey through pregnancy and motherhood vies with the most dramatic of Hollywood depictions. For Tiny is not with child per se — not a human child — but rather an owlet, the offspring of an affair she has with a wild female owl in a dream. Through her experience we see motherhood and associated notions of sacrifice, compassion, and belonging upended and redefined. [Read more…]