Emeline Atwood's debut is an ethereal, anxious coming-of-age novel that captures the relationship between unease and conviction for one woman in her 20s. After experiencing a sexual assault, college senior Lucy wakes one morning and scales a tree, convinced she's a leopard. Once she returns to herself, her mother takes her back to her childhood home, where their hot-and-cold relationship spurs a total upheaval. Lucy dumps her boyfriend, changes cities, and falls into an isolating and abusive relationship with a man named Ellis. While traveling with him, Lucy learns to scuba dive and finds relief from her persistent, trauma-induced pain. She unearths her power in the underwater expanse ("The calm black water around me was resolving an emptiness in my body.... I'd always suspected that such a state could exist again") and draws on it to make her escape. Lucy again changes jobs, states, and partners, and her next few years are marked by as much self-sabotage as happiness, until she is ultimately left reckoning with the actuality of the future and the wildness that lies within herself.
For all its strangeness, A Real Animal is eminently relatable in its poignant portrayal of the decade between 20 and 30 years of age, a period that feels endless and temporal, when one is confronting the mundanity and magic of the world. In Atwood's capable hands, readers will recognize Lucy's search for safety and meaning, and the appeal of a new reality as a way to not only cope with trauma but also confront the very nature of truth and womanhood. This remarkable, emotional novel announces an author to watch. --Kristen Coates, editor and freelance reviewer