Unlikely Animals
2022
Emma Starling was born with healing hands, a gift that made local news and defined her childhood in tiny Everton, New Hampshire, before she left for Pomona and then medical school. She’s since dropped out under circumstances no one back home knows about, her healing touch apparently gone with it, and now she’s been called home because her father, Clive, is dying of a mysterious brain disease that has him hallucinating small animals and seeing visions of Ernest Harold Baynes, a [real-life] naturalist ghost who’s been giving him ideas for how to spend his remaining days. Emma returns to a family in disarray, her mother’s quiet judgment, her brother fresh out of rehab, and the unresolved disappearance of her former best friend, Crystal, an addiction case the police have stopped looking into, though Clive hasn’t given up. The story is narrated in part by the dead of Maple Street Cemetery, who’ve been watching the Starlings for years with a mix of affection and gossipy skepticism, alongside a rotating cast of the living and even a few animals.
This was a delight from start to finish, funny and heartbreaking in equal measure. The structure jumps between timelines and perspectives constantly, and there’s a moment partway through where you start to wonder if Hartnett has taken on more than she can pull together, but by the end every seemingly stray thread, the graveyard chorus, Baynes’s history, Crystal’s disappearance, turns out to matter. The family at the center feels genuinely lived-in: they love each other without always liking each other, which is exactly the kind of messy, real dynamic I want from family fiction. Hartnett also weaves in the opioid crisis without ever letting it overwhelm the book’s warmth and whimsy. It’s a rare combination of big-hearted and structurally ambitious.
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